Cable design is a lot like creating a pizza


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.

jumia

interesting, thoughtful post. i wonder about this stuff a lot. took a long, slow lok at disassembling one end of some morrow audio cables to add bana plug to one end. this and other cables ive examined have a geometry goin on. id imagine theres an informed geometry to it with many possibilities.  

LOL!! That’s exactly what I am doing now my friend. It’s Saturday evening. Am I allowed to? Cheers anyways

I just figured the alcohol analogy went over your head, and the user name it had my  wondering.

 

Oh, and this exactly what you said:

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

Regardless of what THEY claim, do you have a preference in which pizza you like?

There is a local mushroom pizza with truffle oil and gorganzola that is pretty good.
Wood fired is preferred.

 

Or do they taste the same as long as they measure the same? 🤦‍♂️😂

Let me us another analogy.
If I have meal with ingredients (say representing the preamp), and the finally dish that made (representing the amp), I do not put a pizza in the middle to spice it up.

But maybe an iron skillet imparts a flavour that is different from a copper one.

 

If one is running mono blocks then the cables get shorter than a stereo amp in the middle, and their flavour diminishes.
And I would rather just have the pre amp and amp, and flavour maybe with tubes, and leave out over flavouring with additional layers.

 

Sorry, but the farther you get from NYC the worse the pizza (and bagels) gets. Although I do admit having lived in Chicago their deep dish is yummy for what it is, but it’s not real pizza. Ehem. California pizza? Oxymoron. As they say in Brooklyn, fuggetaboudit!

Naples and other Italian places seem to make a decent pizza. And there are other countries that have decent pizzas. But I could see how NTC might be better than South Dakota or South Carolina. And I would not expect NYC to do BBQ like other places.

The Church of Denyin'tology holds to the faith-based religion.

     ONLY: well practiced at projection and cognitive dissonance!

     I have Physics/QED (grounded by theory/experiments post 1900) to back what I believe about wires.

     What’s necessary to understand what happens, regarding signals and transmission lines, is an education that extends beyond H.S. STEM courses (if you even have that much, under your collective belts).

Making measurable things referred to as faith is a bit of an oxymoron.


Back to the pizza.
It looks like a lot of people take a pure whiteDAC, run it into a warm preamp, and use warm cable, and use zobel network speaker cables to play out of a bright speaker in a tiled room.
But it is like a pride flag of filters to arrive back at white.

I liked to color up to the end of kindergarten, but I moved away from that about the time I went from tricycles to bicycles. (And I graduated kindergarten at the normal age of 5-6.)

I suppose if one has bright speakers, amps, or room, then it makes sense to try and colour things with a cable… especially if they are renting, or cannot control the room.

Audio components, including cables, aren't instruments. If you want to "play" the recording, get a mixing board.