If you want to read the most creative sales literature imaginable, sample the marketing material for audio interconnect cables. The esoteric end of the hi-fi market offers cable products which claim to deliver the highest possible quality, and yet these products aren't used in even the best-equipped recording studios. If the recording is being made with 'lesser' cable, then I fail to understand how a more expensive product can reveal hidden sonic detail in the recording when it is played back in a domestic environment.

I thought I'd already seen the world's most ridiculous, overpriced audio cable, but then I saw the 'proprietary' Denon AK-DL1 digital audio interconnect. Retailing at $499 US dollars, it looks uncannily like an ordinary RJ45 ethernet cable costing around 1% as much, albeit with pretty woven jacketing. I was especially bemused to find out that the AK-DL1 is meant to be directional - having spent nearly $500 on a 1.5 metre network cable, you wouldn't want to connect it up the 'wrong way round'.

To send multiple channels of losless digital audio over network cables, you can use the NetJack extension to the JACK sound server. Not only is NetJack a Free Software download, it works with ordinary network cable too!