Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

Dodgealum,

For what it is worth, I agree with previous comments that system synergy is much more important than name brand appeal when finding cabling.

The best advice I can give is to read a lot, find the closest analogies you can to your own system, either in reviews or on boards here or other sites (audio asylum, etc.), buy a few sets, and audition them for a while.

I recently did this myself- it definitely costs money, but if you buy used, it isn't as painful as it could be, and you don't need to spend time breaking in cables. Afterwards, you can re-sell the 'rejects', for lack of a better word, for minimal losses.

In my case, I started in your general price range, but ended up drinking the Koolaid and going upscale- it was worth it in terms of sonic improvements. Your mileage may vary...

I posted here a while back-

Agon cable comment

Good Luck,

Re. objective characteristics of cable behavior, I've found the audioholics site to be worthwile food for thought:

audioholics site

They seem to be pretty far toward the 'objectivist' end of the spectrum of thought re. cable performance, which some will find more appealing than others. The hard data they provide is valuable regardless of its interpretation and eventual shoehorning into electronics theory (which gets very esoteric very fast, at least for me.)

If one can make use of it, perhaps the data can aid in choosing cable evaluation candidates, and perhaps in understanding cable placement differences as well. (impedance matching, capacitance, etc...)

There have also been a couple of articles in Stereophile re. cable theory, at least one of them was by Herve Delatraz, who makes the DarTzeel amp, if I recall correctly. I couldn't find them on the website- perhaps they are only available in print, or I wasn't looking in the right places online.

Fun thread!

Mprime,

Agreed- there's an agenda at Audioholics. I tried to be politic about 'objective' perspectives and finesse the issue by referring to their data as being objective... As long as the experiment is done right, data is always objective. It's the interpretation that gets complicated ;-)

FWIW, Audioholics takes pains to at least give the appearance of doing proper controls- not being an EE, I can't meaningfully judge how good their methodologies are.

Looking at it from another perspective, I think they deserve some praise for actually doing, and talking about, cable measurements. I've certainly never seen Stereophile, Absolute Sound, or any other high-end rag carry out rudimentary, much less standard and routine, measurements of cable properties. Instead, they provide hearing evaluations and sometimes comparisons, which, as we all know by now, are highly specific to system interactions, etc. etc. and may have little if any broad applicability. If I'm going to toss around the 'agenda' word when discussing Audioholics, I should probably be fair and recognize that this approach is similarly 'agenda-driven'. I should probably run for cover at this point before the impending flame-war engulfs us...

Getting superior sound for listening enjoyment is probably the overarching goal of all this (but who can say- some folks seem to like the process of getting there more than the goal...) In getting to that goal, it seems to me that both subjective and objective approaches should be useful, and could be complementary, if folks could be motivated to work together.

Oops. Ending soapbox session now...

Hi Sean,

Thanks for an incredibly content-rich post!

Actually, I also have you to thank for helping me choose Goertz cables as one of the candidates for my recent cable comparison exercise- I spent a lot of time following your discussions with John Risch and others over on the asylum. As I mentioned elsewhere, (see previous post for link) the Goertz sonic performance in my system was unequaled by anything else that I tried.

Without doing a lot more reading, and probably taking a community college electronics course or two, I can't comment that well on your evaluation of design advantages in Goertz cables- I'll trust you ;-).

However, I can make some subjective comments on what these cables 'do right' and hope that you can suggest some ideas for causality based on your electronics knowledge.

The overwhelming difference between the Goertz and everything else (my system, listening environment, musical tastes, etc. etc.- disclaimers and qualifiers get annoying after a while so I'll stop from here on out...) has to do with coherence of the spatial image. There are also frequency balance differences, etc, but for these, other cables are on relatively more even footing with the Goertz.

I tend to break spatial coherence down into two components- for the first, I've heard the term 'splashiness' used- basically, this is a tendency for the image to expand and contract with volume changes, for inner detail and soundstage layering to contract at higher volumes, and in extreme instances, for instrumental images to break up into false echoes. The most clear-cut 'reference track' I use to evaluate this is the Maria Joao Pires/Chamber Orchestra of Europe recording of the Schumann Piano Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon- great playing, but until recently, a frustrating recording to listen to.

What can happen on this recording is that the piano image expands and contracts with volume, and has poorly defined reverbations and echoes that give the impression of coming from virtual and shifting surfaces within the performance hall. The same is true for orchestral passages- these can tend to pop out of nowhere to create a large soundstage with lots of reverb and echoes during loud passages, then contract back during softer passages.

Using the Goertz cables, these effects are gone. What I hear instead is a focused, stable piano image, with reverbations now coming from within the piano's body, and consistent echo cues coming from a performance space whose surfaces and dimensions don't change with volume. The orchestra is all there, and more importantly, stays in the same place- again, spatial cues from echoes give none of the shifting virtual surface impression.

The second component of coherence is a tendency for different frequency components emanating from the same sonic source to become spatially decoupled. As a reference example, I use the Earl Wild Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2 on Chesky- again, a beautiful performance, but really hard to listen to until recently.

What can happen here is that the massed, unison string passages get completely swamped by 'hash and grit' that seems to float over everything. Think 'orchestra accompanied by bee swarm'. This effect is particularly horrible for muted playing.

With the Goertz cables, this tendency goes away- what I hear instead is that the massed strings are now fully localized, and their fundamental sounds are coherently associated with the higher-frequency bow/rosin 'buzz' that comes from the rapid bow speed they are using. The perceived 'harshness' arising from the 'hash and grit' is gone.

I could toss out uninformed hypothesizing, but it's probably better to leave it at that for now, and let you use it as food for thought.

Cheers,

Hi Tvad,

I've got access to an extensive library of technical journals at work- I'll try to find some time (maybe friday afternoon) to see if there is a body of literature in them that might be relevant.

I recall reading that participants in Audio Engineering Society meetings have explored this issue in the past, but have not seen write-ups- if you are inclined, that might be a direction to look into. Perhaps there is a proceedings journal or maybe even a peer-reviewed journal.

Signal propagation characteristics in printed circuit boards are pretty extensively documented- perhaps there are useful analogies here as well.

Tracing back from Audioholics, there is a website by Rob Elliott that has some detailed articles and measurements- there are several references cited that might be worth digging up:

Elliott Site

Then, there's always Google...

Anyways, as far as I'm concerned, no apologies necessary- the more approaches that can be brought to bear on bringing some clarity to the whole cable arena, the better.

Since I missed the censorship thread, I don't have a point of comparison, but this thread has definitely been very informative and entertaining regardless.

Anyways, more info for all on ribbon cables, subject du jour that they are-

Magnan website 'white paper' on ribbon cable design-

Magnan info

Basically, some of the points here exactly mirror Sean's comments above re. skin effects-

"The skin effect phenomenon has been found to be the major signal degrading effect in conventional audio cables. These effects include smearing of musical details, smearing together of instrumental images, flattening of the sound stage, and usually a general overbrightness. Almost all conventional audio cables utilize relatively thick stranded or solid wires which inherently cause gross audio band skin effect time smearing."

From there, the points seem to diverge, and the white paper becomes a mixed bag that includes fun 'marketing' metrics such as the rigorously defined 'Audio Figure of Merit' in Figure 1. :-(

All that aside, if you check out the soundstage review at

Soundstage Review

the comments on the coherency of the system sound are pretty similar to those I made upthread.

Also, there is a comment on cable theory references at the Silversmith Audio site (another manufacturer of ribbon cables)- if anyone knows more about these, I'd love to hear about it. If not, we'll have to wait for Jeffrey Smith to update the site.

Silversmith

I'm referring specifically to this quote in the 'cable theory' section-

"In the last couple of years, impressive scientific studies have been conducted which have measured some differences in wire performance, including directionality, lending some credence to the subjectivist's camp. While the debate rages on, it is interesting to note, that the engineering knowledge needed to explain exactly why cables do make a difference, and accurately predict what a particular cable design will "sound" like, has been available for decades. Unfortunately for audiophiles, it was not until as recently as 1985 that someone actually applied that knowledge to the world of audio cabling. To this day, the Essex Echo - Unification Tracks 1-4, by Malcolm Hawksford, remains the single greatest work on the subject of audio cabling."

Sean, once again, thanks for the detailed post. I'm busy trying to break down your comments into digestible chunks for my 'challenged' brain. My first question regards your comments on 'minimizing skin effects'.

I guess I don't understand all of the relevant length scales that come into play, so I'll think about this from first principles- if a 'skin effect' is always confined to an esentially infinitely thin skin (on the order of 10s of nanometers; i.e., a few hundred atoms of thickness), then I have a hard time understanding how cable geometry matters at all.

In this case, if one thinks about a cable with a circular cross section, then basically the circumference/area of the cross section is the 2-d analog of the surface/volume ratio. Cicumference/area is always 2/r (r = radius.)

The geometry of a ribbon cross section isn't much different- so long as a ribbon's width is relatively large in comparison to its thickness, its perimeter/area ratio approximates 2/t, (t is the ribbon thickness). This approximation holds pretty well for both Alpha-Core products (MI-2 is w = 0.75 inch and t = 0.01 inch) and Magnan products (Reference speaker ribbon is w = 1.25 inch and t = 0.00075 inch).

What this means is that if skin effects really are confined to a very thin layer, it is immaterial whether cable cross section is circular or ribbon-like. For any given radius r = thickness t, the surface/volume ratio is the same.

Taking it a step further, in comparing surface/volume ratios of any two conductors (a and b, lets say), the ratio of the surface/volume ratios (SVRa/SVRb) is rb/ra, or, if a is a ribbon and b is a wire, rb/ta. If 'minimizing skin effect' is equivalent to minimizing surface/volume ratio, then basically the thicker conductor wins in this scenario, regardless of cross-sectional geometry. This outcome seems counterintuitive given everything one sees in cable design.

Still with me? Yeah, me neither...

What I think must actually be going on is that the 'skin affected zone' is relatively deep (let's call the depth d) compared to r or t in any given conductor cross-section. In this case, one can break the conductor down into outer 'skin affected (sa)' and inner 'bulk (b)' regions. Deriving geomeric relationships between these regions must yield some difference in the behavior of the ratios of 'skin affected area' to 'bulk area' for the two geometries (circular vs. ribbon.)

I'm too lazy/tired to do the math at this point- if someone could confirm that I'm either going in the right direction, or completely lost in the woods, I'll be more motivated to revisit the problem later. On the other hand, if someone wants to pipe in and keep me from reinventing the wheel in this analysis, that would be great too.

Next up- thinking about phase errors...

And the learning fun just never stops...

Rooze, FWIW, I've been using AG-2 biwires without the Zobels to connect a Rowland Concentra to Wilson-Benesch ACT-1s. No problems whatsoever. Given Sean's advice, I'm planning on installing the Zobels nevertheless- if there is no sonic difference, I'll leave them in just to be safe.

Sean, thanks for clarifying on skin effect. If one had to create a 'cliff's notes version' of the discussion that is somewhere between the full length explanation above and the 'equal rights for all frequencies' distillation, does it make sense to say that 'minimizing skin effect' actually means 'making the wire so thin that bulk signal propagation is eliminated, resulting in all signal propagation, at all frequencies, occurring in the skin of the cable'? In other words, does 'minimizing skin effect' actually mean 'maximizing skin propagation'?

Re. the Magnan cables- thanks for the tip- I'll go search the archives. It turns out Magnan now has a 'Reference' ribbon that seems to combine a narrower strip of their ultra-thin ribbon used in the 'Signature' cable with the Alpha-Core stacked ribbon structure. No need to place cables side by side for this model. I haven't a clue how they sound, but thought I'd point it out-

Magnan Reference

Cheers,

Alright Tvad, all-

Overdue post re. cable distortion references- (life, or what passes for it, sometimes gets in the way of online chats...)

Spent some time searching through the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI for short) databases. (If you don't know about these folks, they are the premier cataloguers and cross-referencers of all things published in technical fields. Very expensive to use, unless you have an academic account, or a corporate/site license. In my case, don't ask...)

Searching from 1950 to 2004 brings up two broad categories- 'Wires and Cables' at about 5500 articles, and 'Audio Equipment and Systems' at about 9300 articles. 'Signal Distortion' as a search term brings up about 950 references. Cross-searching all three drops results to about 40 references, of which maybe 5 involve signal distortions in coaxial cable designs. I can't actually access the articles immediately- will need to make a visit to one of the friendly nearby university libraries.

For what it is worth, if others want to pursue this, most useful related articles seem to come from 5 sources:

Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
Wireless World
IEEE Symposia on Circuits and Systems
IEEE Transactions on Audio and Electroacoustics
Funkschau (in German)

It would have been nice to see articles come up with titles like 'Analysis of audio-frequency signal distortion as a function of conductor properties, geometry, and environment...'. These don't seem to exist, at least not when searched for by the method outlined above. There are some interesting looking 'tutorial' articles on assorted signal distortion phenomena by Doug Preis in the ECE Dep't at Tufts University, but they are more general in scope.

It's possible that I'm not looking in the right places- either this stuff is so elementary that it is all in textbooks, or it is largely found in literature from another field that doesn't cross-reference with the search areas above.

In any case, I may follow up if there is interest. For now, a trip to your local university libraries to look at the journals above is probably the place to start for those of you who want to pursue this more.

But hey, the exercise wasn't all for nothing- there was an article or two about distortion-free signal propagation in superconducting wires. This should solve all of our problems. ;-)

Actually, when you think about it, the cost of running a liquid nitrogen/liquid helium cooling sheath around some cheap copper cables would probably be less than buying something like the Stealth Indra. (Eventually, the cost of coolant would add up, though.) Anybody want to try selling that as a high-end product? I'll provide 'Angel' funding with the $3 that is currently in my disposable income account... (On the one hand, I'm kidding, but on the other, I'm fully expecting someone on this thread to point out that it has already been done...)

Re. Alpha-Core, I agree with Rooze above- in the only dealing I've had with them, they were very responsive and went out of their way to supply me with what I needed, even though there was very little money in it for them. (Basically, I needed a few inches of AG-1 ribbon to build some jumpers- no problem.)

Cheers,

Oh, look. Everyone got together and worked things out. Very nice! A couple days ago, I was certain that some kind of 'everyone gets a timeout, and if you all play nice after that, maybe some milk and cookies too' post would be called for.

Actually, there are some thoughts that came to mind during the episode above that might make a little more sense to interject now-

1) While I'm as frustrated as anyone else by Robert's tendency to talk around design points rather than be specific, I can completely understand why he's doing it. Any way you look at it, the 'cable business' has extremely low barriers to entry. Basically, any Tom, Dick and Harry can decide to become an audiophile cable manufacturer by making a few phonecalls to Goodfellow, Alfa/Aesar, etc. for 'interesting' wires as well as to McMaster-Carr etc. for 'interesting' tubing, etc. Spend a little additional money on shims, threading devices, soldering, online ads, commisions for a few shills, etc. and you're in business.

NOTE: I'm not saying that the above actions will allow someone to make good cables, nor am I insinuating that folks who get into the business do no more than the above (or all of the above, particularly where the shills are concerned)- I'm just pointing out that from an economic perspective, it is an easy, and relatively unencumbered thing to do. You don't need to license a huge number of patents from entrenched industry players, you don't need to spend a small fortune in startup research and engineering, and you don't need to establish a large, complex business organization.

The point I'm driving at, and may eventually get to, is that for a small player to divulge its strategy or trade secrets in such a business environment is suicidal. Anyone doing so is likely to get eaten from above (the 'shark' attack) if their product offers new technology that a big established player has easy access to, and can appropriate. At the same time, anyone doing so is likely to get eaten from below (the piranha swarm) by a bunch of hungry small competitors who have just had their job made easy for them.

Basically, someone like Robert has no choice to be cagey, unless they are willing to spend very significant amounts of time and money generating an intellectual property strategy and securing patents on whatever new design or technology they have come up with. Successful execution of a patent takes multiple years and costs somewhere between $5k and $10k- not small potatoes for a small business. Then, there is the entire aspect of defending a patent from infringement...

Even if someone were to try protecting their technology by patents, the bar is very high for anyone to successfully patent anything in the cable area, since so much has already been tried, or discussed. This prior art will ensure that any patent is likely to be so narrow that 'workarounds' are easy to develop.

This gets us back to the option of being cagey and playing the cards close to one's vest. Justifiably annoying for those of us interested in the science and engineering of what is going on, but the only reasonable course of action for someone in the business. Personally, my hat is off to Robert for communicating at all outside of the realm of advertising copy.

2) Sean, a couple of quick points on dielectics- your comments on teflon are good as far as they go. However, if dielectric constant is the only thing that matters, one can do much better by simply using air (or a vacuum, for that matter.) Of course, this is difficult to implement, although I've seem a couple of examples of folks building cables with positioning pieces that 'suspend' a wire in the middle of a plastic tube.

Practically speaking, foamed dielectrics are the better way to go- teflon (in its various flavors) polyethylene, polypropylene etc. all can be foamed to yield mostly-air matrices with a fair bit of mechanical integrity, with much lower (bulk) dielectric constants than pure teflon itself.

I can see a few drawbacks to this approach- even if the foam is closed-cell (i.e., the trapped bubbles don't connect physically), a foamed dielectric will be a much poorer barrier layer for a conductor- surface oxidation will be faster. Then, there is the issue of homogeneity on the necessary size scales- if bubbles are too big/too small, then the conductor will see local variations in dielectric environment (low for actual bubbles, high for the plastic bubble walls) that are significant in audio frequency signal propagation.

On the other hand, teflon itself isn't a very good barrier for oxygen permeation- having it there is better than being exposed to air directly, but the rate of gas transport through the teflon isn't insignificant. If one really wanted a barrier layer, then poly(chloro-flouroolefin) polymers are significantly better (however, their dielectric constants are higher). To get to the point where no oxygen reaches the conductor, one needs inorganic barriers such as a glass layer (again, this would be a higher dielectric constant material, but a few microns of coating will suffice).

In all likelihood, I'm barely scratching the surface here- there are probably lots of additional tradeoffs that I'm not even aware of.

It boggles my mind that someone would design a cable with a plasticizer-containing coating. Anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge in the area knows plasticizers move around, degrade, and are freqently reactive with other kinds of materials. The same goes for a lot of UV stabilizers and anti-oxidants present in plastics- once they work their way out of the plastic, they can attack metals. Silly, silly, silly.

3) Twl- I think I agree with the specifics of everything you said upthread, but come to a different conclusion- when you say,

'You can't "spec" or "measure" your way to audio nirvana,'

I have to agree on the experiential level. Where I disagree, or perhaps emphasize things differently, is in being upfront about inadequate measurement techniques. (You mention this as well- I view it as a really central point.)

As I mentioned above, an in-depth look at the technical literature where one would expect to find information about cable measurement and measurement techniques, reveals that there isn't really much there! (Please, someone correct this impression if I'm wrong!)

That being the case, I'm willing to bet my $3 in disposable income that whatever measurement techniques are being used aren't sufficient to reveal the physical processes behind how cable properties affect the human auditory organs, much less how the psychoacoustics work. There are a lot of currently un- or under-investigated connections to be made.

Sean did an excellent job upthread in categorizing cable properties and how they can degrade specific parts of an electrical signal- I'd love to see it formally detailed someplace, preferrably in a peer-reviewed technical journal. Still, going from there, there are many additional gaps until one reaches an understanding of how any one of us experiences 'audio nirvana'.

Until I find those gaps investigated and understood, I'm not willing to concede that 'good measurement' and 'audio nirvana' aren't ultimately the same thing. It's just that the good measurements, and ultimately the predictive models one can derive from them, don't currently seem to exist in any systematic form. (Again, someone please correct me if I'm wrong!) Simply throwing in the towel and saying 'it can't be scientifically explained' ends up in the same place as medical quackery of various sorts- nobody with a rationalist bent or any appreciation at all of human intellectual development wants to end up there.

Happy Labor Day, everyone.

Hi All,

Yet another bit o' information regarding ribbon cables-

We've had some discussion of Alpha-Core and Magnan upthread. I didn't realize until recently that Audio Magic (the folks who also make the 'Stealth' power conditioners) manufacture silver ribbon cables (both speaker and interconnect).

Not cheap, but generally on par pricewise with equivalent Alpha-Core silver products.

I'll refer anyone interested to the Audio Magic website-

Audio Magic

I just received the latest 'Cable Company' newsletter, which mentions that Audio Magic is introducing their new 'TriniumXL' ribbon interconnects- some kind of copper/silver/gold alloy ribbon.

Might be a good time to keep an eye open on closeouts of older/used products.

As always, FYI and FWIW. I haven't heard any of these in a system.

Cheers,