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For decades, the English manufacturer QED has been delivering excellent cable quality at consistently reasonable prices. The basis of the success has always been the elaborate development work of the British - hardly any other manufacturer of audio and video connections has a comparable park of measuring instruments. For example, the Fluke DSX 8000 CAT 8 measuring device was used in the development of the Reference Ethernet, a special analysis tool for testing and certifying Ethernet connections, which alone costs around 16,000 euros. So QED develops and constructs such a cable on the basis of physical principles and does not rely solely on an auditory impression. But why did this Ethernet cable come into being in the first place?

QED looked at different network cables manufactured according to the CAT 5e standard (bandwidth up to 100 MHz) and found that crosstalk often causes errors in the time domain and that the bandwidth required for HighRes data transmission is affected at the latest by the poor contact quality of the connectors. The challenge for the QED developers was therefore to get to grips with these problems using their own Ethernet cable. Developing a CAT connector would certainly have been beyond the financial scope. But that was not necessary at all, because the German contact specialist Telegärtner found a suitable connector in the form of the MFP8 Cat.8.1. Since 2017, the connectors have been manufactured in Steinenbronn, Baden-Württemberg, for transmission rates of up to 100 gigabits per second. They are characterised by a high contact quality and are also better protected against RF interference than many other connectors.

In the listening room, the Lumin Streamer T3 was previously equipped with a connection from Audionet. The Berliners understood very early that the sound quality of their components must not fail because of a bad network cable. With the help of the i-fidelity.net reference speakers Epos ES14N, we can excellently detect differences in sound quality. First, we connect the Lumin with a standard network cable to check what happens to the sound image. The stage now seems narrower in all dimensions and especially the mid-high range gets an annoying component that has what it takes to permanently scare off listeners who have been influenced by records.

With the Audionet line, the size of the stereo stage changes, but above all, the annoying high-frequency picks disappear almost completely. With the QED, the precision of the reproduction increases again, the allocation of the positions of different instruments is easier and voices gain a bit more naturalness. In addition, there is a harmonic flow of tones. There is never a moment when you startle because something is wrong with the reproduction. For those who have had a negative attitude towards streaming for sound reasons, we recommend a listening comparison between a standard and this Reference Ethernet connection, which provides a more harmonious, natural sound image. Those who have been listening to music with an accessory network cable should also make the comparison, because the result is amazing and the required investment is comparatively low.