Some Thought on Cables and Tweaks

I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Marketing goes a long way to influence purchasing. Purchasing can be triggered by a host of reasons, some of them obsessive on the part of the buyer. People in marketing know this and prey on it.

Your description of the various types of dielectrics pretty much sums it up, for me. The less, the better. Purity of metal as conduit goes a long way as well. Beyond that, who really knows? System synergy then comes into play and all bets are off.

As for the 'neutral' nature of a cable goes, I find it funny how review after review touts the neutrality of a cable in one area only to go on about what it does to the extremes as an afterthought, rendering the cable only neutral in the one area mentioned. And just when it was declared neutral, the soundstage is not as wide, or deep, and the performers recede or come forward, or something else is heard in a more convincing manner at the expense of another aspect.

Neutral? Hardly that. They just negated the claim.

I think if reviewers were to claim something sounds more authentic, in one way or another, and leave it at that, it would be more believable. But to claim, across the board, better neutrality and then go one to relate the drawbacks of other areas of performance kind of diminishes the veracity of the reviewer unless he/she goes to lengths to explain just how and where this neutrality lies within reproduction and leave it at that. Anything more makes it an over the top selling point.

All the best,
Nonoise

Sabai, maybe you are looking for something more mysterious, but here are some reasons why some cables sound better than others, or more neutral.

1. Higher purity metals - less impurities; e.g., 0.99999 % copper vs 0.999 copper.  Oxygen free, single crystal, etc.

2. Silver vs copper; silver with gold content, etc.

3. Solid core vs stranded conductor

4. Twisted pair vs parallel wires

5. Flat vs round vs oval conductor

6. Use of multiple conductors of varying gauge

7. Very thin versus medium or heavy gauge conductor

8. Shielded vs unshielded 

9. Better, higher purity materials for connectors

10. Better solder/welding technique for connectors

11. Better dielectric material, e.g. Teflon or air

12. Sufficiently long break in period using break in device

13. cryo'd vs uncryo'd - more homogeneous atomic structure of crystal conductor

14. Balanced vs unbalanced

Cheers, gk

Sabai, you’re definitely on the right track. A couple decades ago, when I was first beginning to investigate what it was that made one speaker wire or IC better than another (at around $600 a pair or less), I wondered, when it came to geometries for example, why every maker seemed to choose a different one and yet they each invariably claimed that theirs alone was THE best one for the application. I didn’t know much, but knew they couldn’t all be right. Overall, I think trying to evaluate wiring simply by relying primarily on reviews is pretty dicey. At some point you just have to break down and consider as much of the underlying physics you can unearth to get at what makers are clearly not telling us.

As far as the physics go, cables can indeed be said to be doing something and by definition that something is necessarily bad. I first learned about this when looking into the ‘system-wiring-all-by-the-same-maker-vs-the-mix-n-match-approach’ debate. The argument for using wiring all from the same manufacturer (or from the same series) goes something like this:

Every wire injects its own unique set of timing errors (electron group delay pattern signature) that can be seen in an oscilloscope with respect to the original test signal, so no wire is perfect in that regard. These errors are the sum total of the wire’s physical elements: metallurgy and gauge, geometry, insulation and connectors. If, for example, each pair of multiple IC's in a system is electrically different (different brands) from the others, then all their individual group delay patterns will be different. That means that their total impact on timing within the system will simply be the sum of the delay patterns of all the pairs. And, if all the pairs were identical, they would simply all have the same pattern and they would all effectively 'overlap' in their timing signatures (while not increasing in amplitude) as seen in a 'scope and, in that sense, therefore act more like a single pair of the IC's in question. Multiple differing timing delay patterns are understood to combine to cause an increase a system's tendency to make the music sound a bit more like it's being electronically reproduced, or more “canned”. The longer the delay and the larger the amount of it there is, the worse the sound.

It may not be quite possible for a maker to get their accompanying speaker wires to have precisely the same pattern as the analog IC's, but any of them worth their salt can get reasonably close and this is what they traditionally try to do.

But, what is all this going to matter if all the IC's in a system are built identically if they are of crap quality to begin with? Yes, all their timing delay patterns are marvelously indistinguishable from each other...they just happen to sound like $hit (the combined scope pattern is severe). As you go down the scale in QUALITY, Not necessarily price, this is what you begin to run into, so everyone has to be realistic about it. OTOH, as you go UP in quality, there begins to be at least a reasonable expectation that the vast majority of the wiring you're going to run across all tends to have rather benign delay patterns anyway, so very small, and therefore so innocuous, that individual contributions won't likely be adding up to something too objectionable sounding at the speakers. And at that point the consideration is on other characteristics of the wire being considered: their tone, speed, dynamics, etc, etc.

But, in regards to your op, Sabai, maybe my main point here is simply the model that wiring, when using an oscilloscope anyway, is not so much ‘doing something magical’ as all the makers would plainly have us all believe, but rather that the best wires can, and should, be thought of as simply satisfying Ohm’s Law the best and otherwise simply managing to do the least harm in the system. The rest may amount to little more than descriptive language…not that that’s all useless – I’m no objectivist. It’s just that I think that descriptive language should never be substituted for a more proper understanding that can be had through the basic physics involved – even if the reality is that we’re left by the makers to try to uncover all that for ourselves. Cheers.

Ivan wrote,

"But, in regards to your op, Sabai, maybe my main point here is simply the model that wiring, when using an oscilloscope anyway, is not so much ‘doing something magical’ as all the makers would plainly have us all believe, but rather that the best wires can, and should, be thought of as simply satisfying Ohm’s Law the best and otherwise simply managing to do the least harm in the system. The rest may amount to little more than descriptive language…not that that’s all useless – I’m no objectivist. It’s just that I think that descriptive language should never be substituted for a more proper understanding that can be had through the basic physics involved – even if the reality is that we’re left by the makers to try to uncover all that for ourselves. Cheers."

Not sure I go along with your generalization that cable makers use language that suggests they believe, or wish us to believe, cables are "doing something magical." On the contrary, reading what most of the major cable makers, including high end cable makers, say on their web sites, it's clear they wish to present their products in the best possible scientific light, including research, theory, and manufacturing techniques. Most cable makers also take pains to characterize their products in terms of purity of metals, special geometries, special dielectric materials, special connectors, special treatments they might employ such as cryogenics, etc. The cable makers I am referring to include Kimber, Cardas, Shunyata, Nordost, Audioquest, Purist Audio, and many others.