Hi Ronnie,

If I'm reading AQ's website correctly, their Diamond uses a solid core, but not solid silver. I believe the silver is just the outer coating, but I could be very wrong!

Re impact on transmission of packetized data, I've not experimented with Audiophile Ethernet cables. But I'd guess that, if you were to compare two long runs of cable (say 20m), one basic CAT5 or CAT6 and the other AQ Diamond, I think you'd see quite a big difference in attenuation, in favour of the AQ Diamond. It's clearly a matter of extent, but this would certainly reduce SNR in the standard cable and, perhaps, require more error correction. If you were to compare AQ Diamond with bog standard CAT5, the difference in impedance and attenuation would be an order of magnitude, leading to the same impact on SNR.

Of course, it's all down to what the error correction does with this attenuated and lower SNR signal, but experience of the GISO suggest the impact might be bigger than we might expect.

Re EMI, yes, silver is a better conductor and, assuming this is where you're coming from, a silver-skinned solid core conductor would certainly carry any RFI that had got into the cable with less attenuation, along with the wanted HF signal. So, use of silver would need to be counteracted with a very high standard of outer and inner screening. I've also seen some audiophile Ethernet cables that include low-pass filters in line, possible for this very reason.

By the way, I'm not advocating use of AQ products or similar ones - just saying I can see some principles that would explain them offering some performance gain, albeit at very high cost.

Dave

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