Ethernet Cables make a difference

[alphafox]

Interesting thread! It is quite funny how digital transfer is not understood by most people. Coming from the analog world, one may consider all signal transport as real-time and definitive, i.e. if one equipment tempers the signal, there's no way you can correct it later. Digital transfer introduces the possibility of asynchronous protocols, the speed of transmission being much higher than the required data throughput.
When investigating cable influence on sound quality, you should just wonder "is the digital signal synchronous or asynchronous?". In the case of early USB DAC connection, the PC and DAC were synchronous on the PC clock: poor quality of the USB cable could cause the loss of some bits, impacting the sound quality (not mentioning the poor PC clock quality introducing jitter...). However, with Ethernet connection (or WiFi), the transferred audio data is buffered and lost packets are re-resent asynchronously from the playback. So, the Ethernet cable cannot impact the digital data stream.
The only reason one may invest in high-quality cables is for electronic perturbation, assuming the DAC is of poor conception, not isolating properly the inputs... When it comes to Deviatet, I assume its engineers are competent enough to ensure the isolation of the input stage!