Bibacord Ethernet Cable

We have been working for quite some time on an Ethernet cable to join the Bibacord lineup. Conductors are solid core OCC copper with foamed FEP as insulation. The construction includes thick layers of damping materials and shielding by carbon screens. Great care is taken to minimize the “intra-pair skew” in the geometric layout. The final result is well beyond our expectations, we did not expect the Ethernet cable to have such a large influence on the sound.

The cable utilizes the 100BASE-TX specification which supports a maximum speed of 100 Mb/s. This means that only two of the four available pin pairs in the Telegärtner RJ45 connector are in use (pin 1-2 and 3-6). The two conductor paths for sending and receiving data are well separated and individually shielded by carbon screens. In this application the screens are attached in both ends to the connector body.

It is possible to build a 1000BASE-T version with a maximum speed of 1000Mb/s by using four instead of two conductor paths. However, this would make the cable unnecessarily bulky and expensive for ordinary audio applications (where only two paths are used).