Lee Hutchinson
Audiophile-grade "Vodka" Ethernet cables, from AudioQuest. They even have directional indicators!
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We're still writing up the results of last weekend's James Randi Educational Foundation audiophile Ethernet challenge, and we should have it finished soon. While that's in progress, we wanted to share some good old-fashioned cable porn with you all. We purchased two 1.5 meter AudioQuest Vodka cables, since you always want to have a spare for any kind of on-stage demonstration. Rather than simply return them used to Amazon—which doesn't feel terribly ethical—we decided that at least one of the cables could better serve the public interest by sacrificing itself to undergo a methodical evisceration by my handy-dandy iFixit toolkit.
So, with an X-acto knife and spudgers and vice grips in hand, I separated the hefty expensive cable into its components, layer by layer. Potentially fantastical claims about audio clarity aside, the cable itself is of reasonably high quality, with braided and foil shielding around the entire cable coupled with foil shielding around the individual twisted pair bundles. The plugs are high-quality Telegärtner MFP8s, which cost about 9 EUR each depending on where you get them. There's every indication that the cables conform to the listed Category 7 specifications and, if you were so inclined, you could almost certainly use them for 10-gigabit Ethernet over 100-meter runs and possibly even for short runs of 40-gigabit Ethernet (provided you can find the switching gear for 40GbE with 8P8C connectors). Of course, you can also use other shielded Cat7-equivalent Ethernet cables that cost one-tenth the Vodkas' price for the same purpose, so the fact that they're high quality cables doesn't really justify the price.
When we finally stripped away everything and got down to the actual twisted pair of copper wires, we were pleased to see that they were indeed coated in silver, as the manufacturer's page describes. I am not smart enough or educated enough to judge the manufacturer's claim that the silver coating is "excellent for very high-frequency applications, like Ethernet audio," and that the high-frequency signals "travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor" and thus "use" the silver instead of the underlying copper. I leave it to commenters to weigh in on if that actually, you know, means anything.
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