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

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.