Cable design is a lot like creating a pizza

It serves to illustrate how ridiculous cable design is. Especially if they can't explain what they've done Beyond marketing rhetoric.

This also applies to preamplifiers and amplifiers.  And here even more complicated, and many are profoundly confused as to why components sound the way they do. 

Mostly we are all paying for fantasy creations of clever and very smart creators of complex electrical Devices.  
And like many of us I pay up for this stuff. Sounds better, no idea why. 
 

I don't agree that cables are like pizza; but sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.

@roxy54 

Congratulations on never having had a bad pizza.😁

Women are like cables very hard to understand and can be a short-lived fantasy.

If you look at the construction of an RCA cable it can be very simple or can be very complicated. Eg. Audio quest higher end interconnect cables are extremely creative, the diagram on their website is visually stunning.

Ultimately, Cable design in many cables involves coloring the tonal signature. Cooking a pizza is all about making all the ingredients come together so it tastes amazing. Some do it a lot better than others and Pizza is a lot cheaper.

For cables, There are conductors, drain wires, shielding, Airfilled tubes, different gauges, etc…. Then there’s the copper strands which can be very detailed and numerous and twisted. So much going on.

With pizza you have cheese and sauce and spices and the dough and it’s all mixed together with all kinds of variation. Ultimately the sauce makes or breaks the success of a pizza slice.

With audio cables, hi end Cable designers are endlessly trying different ways to do all this. In the end they find something that sounds kind of nice. They may not know exactly why it does sound the way it does.

So that’s my take on Pizza design and cable design.

OK - another analogy might be better.

Cables are like vodka and spirits.

We can have pure grain alcohol (maybe with rain water for the Sterling Hayden crowd)….
Or we can flavour it with oak and hundreds of berry types etc.

I would rather that the cable be zero capacitance 0 inductance, and 0 resistance… so it was like the amp was wired to the speaker… and maybe no crossover either.

I can then spice it with electronics or a DSP…

Basically there is no way to add in distortion with say a preamp, and remove it with a cable. One could add in other distortion to make it more even across the playing field, but what is the point?
It becomes an almost impossible combination of adding in distortions to arrive at a flavour of the month.

So yeah they are exactly like a pizza, and everyone claims that their pizzas are the best.