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Gallery: We tear apart a $340 audiophile Ethernet cable and look inside

May 30, 2023

Lee Hutchinson - Jul 22, 2015 11:52 pm UTC

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