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.

The Reference Ethernet is a CAT 8 cable. This Gigabit Ethernet cable supports bandwidths of up to 2,000 MHz and enables transmission speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second. In order to achieve these values, not only a careful geometric construction is required, but the cable also needs a shielding that keeps electromagnetic interference away and suppresses crosstalk between the different conductors. In the Reference Ethernet, four different layers, including an iron-impregnated jacket and an aluminium foil, provide the appropriate protection for the signal. Transmitting digital music data in DSD 512 and 32 bit / 384 kilohertz format without interference and in the correct time should therefore not be a problem for this line.

 

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