The Science of Cables

Engineers and audiophiles have locked horns time and again, in one long argument about the attributes of speaker and interconnect cables for high-resolution audio reproduction. Audiophile designs for wire and cable products are often strange and fanciful, and haven't earned a lot of respect in the engineering world. Audiophiles, meanwhile, find that engineers do not take their evaluations of cable products very seriously. The result often is that these two groups talk past one another, as the audiophile appeals to the realm of subjective experience and the engineer dismisses it all as nonsense.

A standard approach to any problem in audio cabling begins with some fundamental measurable attributes of wire and cable: R (resistance), L (inductance) and C (capacitance). But Galen came to believe that while these factors account for MUCH of what goes on in a cable, it is still possible for cables with the same R, L and C to have different sounds. The difference comes down to time -- that some factors which are not taken fully into account in measuring overall R, L and C do affect the relative speeds of parts of the signal as they travel down the signal path. For example, while VP (velocity of propagation) is typically stated as a constant, it actually varies, and varies substantially, with frequency within the audio band. Ideally, one wants every part of a signal to travel at the same speed, and Galen looked to ways to mitigate and balance frequency-dependent effects upon signal timing.