Let’s start with this. How are you listening to it now? Need to know what you’re working with first.

Were you around a loud environment that day? I definitely get ear fatigue sometimes and by the end of the day nothing sounds good.

My office at work has a pair of JBL 4406’s that I use for monitoring various audio sources and just jamming some tunes sometimes. Love those little guys. I’m a broadcast radio engineer for reference.

We use Axia audio over IP (AoIP) but all the I/O into the nodes that do the digital conversion use RJ45. A majority of my runs are local to the room the node is in and then that node is connected to a Cisco switch running my AoIP network. But I always keep a backup analog out of the main console engine run down to the main racks in case the AoIP network goes down.

I wouldn’t use it for speaker wire unless you are pushing very low wattage through it.

We don’t use it for speaker cable just analog/digital audio

The only thing I disagree with is your description of an unbalanced audio wire. I am a broadcast radio engineer and we primarily use balanced audio for obvious reasons and your description is spot on for that. But I would say that unbalanced is a positive signal and a ground.

You can even adapt a balanced output to an unbalanced input by wiring to only the positive and ground connections from the balanced wire. The signal level would be far too high for most consumer equipment so we always use what we call a matchbox to interface balanced and unbalanced audio connections. Basically a small active device that lets you adjust how much to drop the audio level for left and right.

And FWIW the building I work in has a 5kw AM transmitter operating inside of it. In our industry it’s become pretty much standard to use off the shelf cat5e for audio cable. I probably have miles of it running all over the building just being slammed with RF and very rarely do we get interference besides a few hotspots we avoid.

We use these adapters to interface with older equipment, most modern broadcast gear accepts RJ45 directly for balanced audio I/O or audio over IP/AES67. Saves a ton of room in rack space because they can give you a ton of I/O in the space a 8 port switch would take up. XLR inputs take a huge amount of real estate comparatively.

https://studiohub.com/adapters/

So yeah I’ve not been fooled by snake oil audio cable nonsense. I see the proof everyday that it’s not true.