Comment Directional arrows aren't as silly as you'd think (Score 1, Insightful) 391
These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.
And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.
It's in the caption of the very first picture:
Audiophile-grade "Vodka" Ethernet cables, from AudioQuest. They even have directional indicators!
But, surprisingly for Ars, they missed the point of those directional indicators. The article on electrical testing hints at it:
Finally, the braided shield inside the cable drew some comments. "There is no continuity from the body of the one connector to the body of the other, indicating that the shield has not been terminated to one or both of the connector," noted Denke. "Our 6A uses an absorptive shield—that is, the cable is shielded but the shield is not terminated at either end. Alien crosstalk is the crosstalk which occurs between cables, as opposed to the internal crosstalk which occurs between the pairs in a cable. This may also be why there are unterminated shields on the Audioquest cable—I’m not really sure what the reason is there, though I had thought that the shields on Cat 7 were required to be tied to ground. It is also possible—I have no handy way to test—that they've tied the shield to one end only, though this would be highly nonstandard for network cabling." (emphasis added)
It's highly nonstandard for network cabling, but highly standard for audio cabling - it's called a telescoping shield and is used to prevent ground loops and audible (60 Hz) hum. Typically, you leave the shield connected at the low-impedance source, and disconnect it at the high-impedance load... as a result, the cable actually does have a directionality, but on the shield, rather than the signal lines. I can guarantee that's the intent with these cables and why they're marked with directional arrows, and it's pretty surprising that Ars and Denke missed it. Maybe they were stuck thinking "network" cable rather than "audio" cable.
That said, because these are network cables, that telescoping shield is irrelevant. You're not going to get ground hum into your amplifier from your network card, the way you would with a shield on an analog audio cable. They're simply not connected, and if they were, you'd have much bigger issues - like that hum causing all sorts of problems on your PCI bus. This is why network cable shields are typically connected at both ends: ground loops are irrelevant.