Why are we going 300 or more directions?


Funny, if you design a hi-speed coaxial cable, the fundamental design is the same. I do mean the same. Physics have honed the basic construct to the same physical design no matter who makes it.

Yes, conductor and shield materials will change some based on the frequency range, but not the design. If you change the basic design, you get worse performance, and not just differentiation (unless worse is your differentiation).

Then we have audio cables. True, audio exist in a frequency range where stuff does change with respect to frequency (impedance drops markedly as frequency is swept from 20 to 20 kHz) but this still doesn't allow willy-nilly designs from A to Z to hold the best electrical ideal.

If there are X number of speaker cable makers, only a small few can be the most ideally right according to physics for audio transmission. What we have is so much differentiation that it is almost humorous.

If "we", as in speaker cable designers, all got in a big room with the door locked and could not be let out till we balanced the design to best effect...what would that cable look like? Why?

Go to any web site and you can't get one-third of the way through before vendors allow misconception to be believed (references to velocity of propagation for instance) that are meaningless in their feint of hand or simply unprovable as to their effect...simply fear you don't have it. For instance, high velocity of propagation allows you to simply lower capacitance, the speed is there, but irrelevant at audio and cable lengths that you use. The signal travels too fast to matter. Signal delay is in the 16ns range in ten feet. Yes, that's 16 trillionths of a second. It's the capacitance folks, not the velocity that you engineer to. But velocity "sounds" exciting.

Audio cable over the years should be under CONSOLIDATION of principals and getting MORE like one another, not less so. I don't see a glimmer of this at all.

The laws of physics say there is a most correct way to move a electrical signal, like it or not. Electrical and magnetic fields have no marketing departments, they just want to move from A to B with as little energy lost as possible. You have to reach a best balance of variables. Yes, audio is a balance as it is in an electromagnetic transition region I mentioned earlier, but it STILL adheres to fundamental principals that can be weighed in importance and designed around.

A good cable does not need "trust me" engineering. An no, the same R, L and C in two cables don't make them the same. We all know it isn't that simple. BUT, the attributes (skin effect and phase responses) that DO make those same R, L and C cables different aren't magic, either.

I've listened to MANY cables this past six months, and it no longer amazes me which ones sound the best. I look at the several tenets that shape the sound and the designs that do this the most faithfully always come out on top.

DESIGN is first. Management of R, L, C, Skin effect and phase. Anyone cam stuff expensive material in a cable, few can DESIGN the right electrical relationships inside the cable. Why be stuck with excessive capacitance (over 50 pF/foot) to get low inductance (less than 0.100 uH/foot) when it's NOT required, for instance. A good design can give you BOTH!

MATERIALS are a distant second to sound quality. They contribute maybe 2 tenths of the total sonic equation in a quality design and ZERO in a bad design. A good design with standard tough pitch copper will exceed a bad design with single crystal cryogenic OFC silver-plated copper. You can't fake good cable design and the physics say so. Anyone can buy materials, so few can do design.

Being different to be different isn't a positive attribute in audio cables. Except for all but ONE ideal design it’s just a mistake.

I've listened to the same cables with dynamic speakers and electrostatic speakers, and the SAME cables always come through with the same characteristics. Good stays good. True, the magnitude of character is different, but the order hasn't moved.

I'm not real proud of the cable industry in general. True transmission accomplishments should reach common ground on explainable principals and that SHOULD drive DESIGN to a better ideal. But, we people do have emotions and marketing.

What do I look for in a speaker cable?

1.0 Low capacitance. Less than 50 Pf / foot to avoid amplifier issues and phase response from first order filter effects where the phase is changing well before the high-end is attenuated. The voltage rise time issue isn't the main reason low capacitance is nice, it's that low capacitance removes the phase shift to inaudible frequencies and doesn't kill amplifiers.

2.0 Low inductance as we are moving lots of CURRENT to speakers. Less than 0.1UH /foot is what you want to see. Good designs can do low cap and low inductance, both.

3.0 Low resistance to avoid the speaker cables influencing the speakers response. The cable becomes part of the crossover network if the resistance is too high. For ten-foot runs, look for 14 AWG to maybe 10 AWG. Bigger isn't better as it makes skin depth management issue too hard to well, manage.

4.0 Audio has a skin depth of 18-mils. This is where the current in the wire center is 37% of that on the surface. The current gradients can be vastly improved with smaller wire (current closer to the same everywhere). How small? My general rule is about a 24 AWG wire as this drop the current gradient differential across the audio spectrum to a value much less than 37%. Yes, that's several wires. Don't go overboard, though. Too much wire is a capacitance nightmare. Get the resistance job done then STOP at that wire count.

5.0 Conductor management. Yes, point four above says more than one wire, many more! And, if you use 24 AWG wire for skin depth management, it can be SOLID to avoid long term oxidation issues. I've taken apart some old wires and it can look pretty bad inside! Each wire needs it's own insulation.

6.0 Symmetrical design. Both legs are identical in physical designs allows much easier management of electricals.

7.0 Proper B and E field management is indirectly taken care of by inductance and capacitance values. The physics say you did it, or you didn't. BUT, you can design in passive RF cancellation if you use a good design, too. Low inductance says that emissions will be low, however, as less of the energy is generating an electric and magnetic field around the wire, thus limiting EMI / RFI emissions.

8.0 Copper quality is finally on the list. It doesn't matter without one to seven! The smaller the wires (infinitely small), the LESS the silver plate will warp the sonics. If the current density is the SAME at all frequencies, then all frequencies see the same benefit. If a wire is infinitely big than the high frequencies will see the majority of the benefit. 20 Hz and 20kHz are at the same current density on the wire surface. But, the gradient difference is too small to matter with 24 AWG wires. If you want silver, let the silver benefit everywhere!

9.0 Dielectrics. Dead last. Why? Because capacitance is driven by your dielectric. If you have the low cap, you have the right dielectric for the design. You HEAR the capacitance and NOT the dielectric per say. True, Teflon allows a lower capacitance for the same distance between wires, thus making lower capacitance. But, if you FOAM HDPE from 2.25 down to 2.1 dielectric constant, it can meet the same cap at the same wall and sound just as good. Careful though, it is now more fragile! It's a trade-off in durability, not sound quality. Teflon isn’t magic. It is expensive.

10.0 This is not last per say as it is CHOICE in design. I do not like fragile cables laying on the floor to be stepped on. Some do. A good cable design should be durable enough to take that late night trip to the TV set with the light low, and then step on your cable by accident. The cable should be user friendly.

Everything above can be calculated by known physics equations with the exception of copper quality on sound. I'll have to hear this on two IDENTICAL cables except wire quality. But, why would a vendor allow you to do that when they can scare you into a more expensive copper? I'll be glad to pony-up if I'm allowed to make the judgement for myself. Or, let be buy it at a reasonable price!
rower30
Wow Rower, what a great post!! As you alluded to, cables are audio's last refuge for scoundrels. When marketing hype takes precedence over excellent design, good-quality parts, and solid construction, the audiophile world suffers.

And your post has made it clear to me that one need not spend ridiculous sums of money to get "proper" cabling. When I read about guys spending thousands (or even hundreds) of $ per ft. for cabling, I inwardly smile...

-RW-
Rower,

I'd be interested in your opinion of some more esoteric designs that are more towards the reasonable cost end of high end audio products, specifically DNM Reson and MIT (with network boxes) analog ICs.

Analog ICs specifically because I am sure I hear some distinct advantages with these more esoteric IC designs and have not had reason nor desire to experiment with speaker wires very much.

Also, digital cables are a different story and I am of the opinion it is even easier to do those well than it is analog wires.
Cables sometime raise two kids and let the third one run wild. Low R and L, but high C as an example. To get low capacitance in a design (you have to hold the design exactly the same) inductance will go in the opposite direction. If it goes too wacky, it eats up amplifiers and / or requires Zobel networks to offset capacitance just like power-line power factor correction circuits. Fundamentally superior designs have low R, L and C from the get go. You can't force too high cap to go lower as it pushes inductance up. The design is simply poor. More paper, start over!

With compensation you no longer have a cable per say, but a circuit. One is useless without the other. Many do indeed market circuits. This isn't completely wrong, but it isn't an ideal "cable" either. Take away the Zobel network or "pole articulation filter(s)" and the effort is lost. So, those products are a different breed than cable design, and more expensive as they extend the margins on both fronts.

Some even try to say they "separate" the magnetic fields and electrical fields into different areas of the cable to improve the sound. I'll use Ebm's comment, "Say what??Dude??". This is impossible, as one needs the other to exist. They are tied at the hip like capacitance and inductance. Unless we move to planet ZEN, this will always be so. Not sure about ZEN, actually, has anyone been there except in the game?

The key concept to understand on fields is that the two fields take away energy, and thus the signal. They don't come from anywhere, and they don't go to anywhere instantly. They steal away energy to exist. This is distortion that is required in the real world when we pass current in two wire separated by distance, like it or not. There is no perfect cable, but there are GOOD DESIGNS.

Why do we have to live with imperfect cables? Here we go (those that don't like longer posts should leave now).

Knowing what a perfect conductor is allows you to recognize a good compromise that fits the world we live in. I was going to put this in the initial thread but I think I wore myself out writing it!

A perfect wire is / has / can;

1.0 Has ZERO resistance and thus loses no signal amplitude. This is a benign distortion in that it is linear. So in reality ZERO resistance isn't really critically important UNTIL you include the speakers X-over. Now it's a problem.

2.0 Is infinitely small. There is NO skin effect as ALL as current across ALL frequencies are IDENTICAL. Well, this is a tough one so we have to gauge (pun intended) the wire to our frequency pass band. A wire has to exist in reality, but to what size? The dimensions are limited by the designers ability to manage many wires.

3.0 Carries energy in BOTH directions at the exact same time. Umm...this is a short circuit in reality. But, if we could do that, the magnetic / electrical fields would be equal and opposite. We would not waste energy creating fields around the single full duplex audio wire. Just think infinite transient response...with a little help from a vacuum, that's next.

4.0 The dielectric would be a vacuum so we have ZERO capacitance and velocity would be 100%. Great, we just got rid of phase effects caused by band-pass filter characteristics and rise time voltage distortion.

So, we have a perfect audio wire, in our mind anyway. And, that 's a good thing when shopping for cables.

We all would like this impossible to make wire. The next best thing is a ZIP cord, many feel. Well, if you can make a zip cord with 24 AWG wire, keep it short so that the DCR doesn't influence the speakers response, and use a good dielectric they can sound pretty darn good...and they should as they obey all the required tenants of a good cable. Except that they have too high a DCR in any meaningful length and / or speaker efficiency. Once you try to make a ZIP cord bigger, it goes to hell. DCR get lower, but BIG wire loses skin current management, stranded is a bad screen and gets worse over time. This forces many smaller wires... that are hell to manage with all those wires increasing capacitance. A capacitor is a dielectric on each side of a conductor. Make it LONGER or WIDER and the capacitance goes up...a LOT. It's a squared law increase, so many wires is hard to do, not impossible. So here we are with much larger AWG requirements and about 36 wire.

A clue to excellent B and E field management is if the overall cable has lower inductance than a SINGLE "unit" used in the cable. This demonstrates, with out magic, that the design leverages superior field cancellation. You can't fake it.

Another issue to some is RF. Electrical fields leave the cable perpendicular to the surface of the wire, always, and cancel at ninety degrees intersection to other like electric fields. The problem is, you can't go "forward" with one wire stuck at ninety degrees to another. That's an "X"! So, you try to manage RF by as good a cross-field cancellation as you can with passive field cancellation through reasonable wire crossings of LESS THAN ninety degrees. Remember, the magnetic fields are cancelled by the close parallel proximity of each wire where closer is better, and the electric fields cancel by cross-field interaction cancellation. A design has passive RF cancellation or it doesn't.

Overall shields? YIKES! This pretends we ALL HAVE A PROBLEM (we do, just not in our systems) and uses a another less bad, but still bad solution...a shield. This is still bad as it drives up capacitance to unnecessary level UNLESS the second worst problem (a shield) is better than the worst (no shield). If you have no real RF issues, ditch the shield! On a speaker cable the problem is probably egress FROM your speaker cable TO you electronics, not ingress FROM the outside world into your speaker cable.

Another interesting factoid is that a dielectric polarizes by nature (that's WHY it is a dielectric) in about 10 to the minus fourteen seconds! Hey, that's fast. The polarity reversals need little help at audio frequencies to switch polarities. Yes, at HIGH, HIGH and I mean HIGH frequencies in the many giga hertz, the dielectric can lose the ability to keep up. But it’s fastest at 1 Hz and gets slower from there. But at 20 kHz it's not even an issue at all. And, most polarization modes don't even count in audio. Yes, there are about three, and I won't bore you with them all.

So, we never have perfect sound. Every cable will be a fingerprint of its design, more than materials. A good-looking people tend to always look good! The clothes aren't going to fix the major issues with the person’s looks, as an example. Buy the person FIRST. DESIGN, DESIGN, and DESIGN! No, you can't measure all the effects of a system as complex as an audio cable as it lives in the electromagnetic transition zone, and drives an unstable load (speaker) with respect to frequency. BUT, you can segregate good design from bad based on a BALANCE of electricals for truly superior cable. Take those type cables home, and I'm certain that what I've mentioned will perk up to the top of the list when you listen.

Digital cables are more about reflection errors. Lengths are important based on cable bit rate speeds that define the cables worst reflection lengths, called RL or Return Loss. Rise time errors aren't so bad with modern electronics (thank-you 100 Gig Ethernet!) and pretty short leads. If a zero or a one is sent and received, the DAC is the sound as it re assembles the data. Not an easy job, by the way! You never get to hear a zero or a one as they are simply logic "states" that the electronics uses to compile analog data. Digital starts with analog, so it's goal is to not screw that up in the middle between A to D and D to A converters.

Cables I use? I have ONE TYR 2 NORDOST XLR interconnects that is good sounding. I'll use it as a reference when I work on other XLR cables. I've auditioned the NORDOST speaker’s cables. I brought them home based on their good overall DESIGN, NOT the not so good price! But, the fact that the design is solid is weighed out in the sound. The price is emotional. I was looking at DESIGN and the connection so sonic ability. Good cable stays good all the time. You do NOT want to use cables to "tune" your system, especially if you buy them. Make sure they go ANYWHERE with ease. A well-designed neutral cable is what you really want. A perfect cable, for instance, is what we really want, and it does NOTHING to the signal. So if you are really into this for a good DESIGN cable you want an equal hand of justice to weight the attributes just so. I listen for an even tonal balance top to bottom. Trust me, use three or four cables an you'll hear an even handed product pretty quick.

Speaker cables? Oh I have some. You can't buy them.