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Audiophile-grade "Vodka" Ethernet cables, from AudioQuest. They even have directional indicators!Lee Hutchinson
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Detail on the Vodka cable's nylon sleeve. It's springy!Lee Hutchinson
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Our Vodka cable, stripped of its braided nylon sleeve. "Audioquest -> Vodka RJ/E -> RJ45/Ethernet Digital Cable * Low Jitter * Solid 10% Silver Conductors * Noise Dissipation System * Cat.7 Individually Shielded Pairs * CMD 24 AWG 4 Pairs," it says.Lee Hutchinson
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That's a hell of an RJ45 connector. It's actually a Telegärtner MFP8 Cat 6A field assembly RJ45 plug. Pricing varies, but they cost approximately 9 EUR each.Lee Hutchinson
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Close-up of the AudioQuest Vodka Ethernet cable. Note the arrow on the connector. "All audio cables are directional," says manufacturer AudioQuest. "For best results have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music. For example, NAS to Router, Router to Network Player."Lee Hutchinson
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One more good view of the Telegärtner plug before we rip it open with pliers.Lee Hutchinson
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Inside the plug, the pairs each terminate in a nice little box. So much nicer than crimping them directly into an RJ45 head.Lee Hutchinson
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Flipping over to see the other two pairs' terminators.Lee Hutchinson
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Is that...masking tape? Inside our $350 cable? Looks like, yes.
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Yes. Yes, it is.Lee Hutchinson
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This is, by weight, the most expensive strip of masking tape I've ever purchased.Lee Hutchinson
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Detail on the RJ45 pinout.Lee Hutchinson
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Side view of the RJ-45 pinout.
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The RJ45 pinout connects to these golden fingers at the edge of the plug, while the fingers' traces run back to the cable termination boxes.Lee Hutchinson
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Other side of the assembly.Lee Hutchinson
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Popping one of the little boxes off to show the metal taps that connect the actual twisted pair of cables to the board.Lee Hutchinson
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Angle view on same.Lee Hutchinson
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Our de-taped, de-plugged cable. Visible is the melted remnant of one of the plastic plug form pieces.
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The two halves of the Telegärtner plug. The bottom half had some portion of the clear plastic plug form melted into it from the cable termination.Lee Hutchinson
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Same view, with the plug turned over.Lee Hutchinson
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I've sheared out a length of cable about 3.5cm long to dissect further.Lee Hutchinson
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The sleeve didn't really like my attempt at slicing it cleanly with an X-acto knife.Lee Hutchinson
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The polyethylene insulating cable sheath. Sorry about the focus in this picture—no idea where it was trying to go.Lee Hutchinson
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Dead-on view of the sectioned cable. From the outside in there's the polyethylene layer, then a braided shield, then a foil shield, then four individual shielded silver-coated pairs of copper wires. I didn't see a drain wire, but there was an additional strand of copper in the shield of each twisted pair.Lee Hutchinson
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We slit the outer polyethylene layer, exposing the braided shielding and the foil shield beneath that.Lee Hutchinson
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The braided shield, plus the foil shield, plus the shielded pairs makes this a Category 7 S/FTP cable—though, actually, I'm not sure if that's the right acronym for all three shields. Also, "Category 7" isn't an actual TIA category.Lee Hutchinson
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Peeling open the inner foil layer to show our actual twisted pairs, wrapped in their own layers of plastic and foil.Lee Hutchinson
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Peeling back the plastic to show the foil around the twisted pair.Lee Hutchinson
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And with the foil out of the way, the twisted pair of copper that gives "twisted pair" cabling its name. There's also a third strand of copper bundled in.Lee Hutchinson
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The two pairs and the third wire separated out.Lee Hutchinson
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Peeling back the final layer of insulating plastic around the silver-coated copper wire.Lee Hutchinson
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And here we have a view of the silver-coated copper wires at the heart of the Vodka cable. The manufacturer claims that the silver plating is "excellent for very high-frequency applications, like Ethernet audio."Lee Hutchinson
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Another view of the wire with some of the silver abraded back by my X-acto knife. "These signals," continues the manufacturer, "being such a high frequency, travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor." If you say so. I'm just the guy with the knife and the pliers.Lee Hutchinson
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The gutted cable, laid out for all to see.Lee Hutchinson
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.
Listing image by Lee Hutchinson
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