Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

Sean -
A comment on your comment on mechanical resonance in cables. I don't argue the existence of microphonics at all. Though cables that can shake a component chassis have to be *really* big and heavy; it's much more common that a cable attached to a component at one or both ends will have vibration transferred to it by the component.

Anyway, I've experienced at least a dozen cables with various implementations of resonance damping. The common property I've heard is a lowered noise floor, so that more low level information is audible, but an annoying lack of clear focus in the imaging. There may, or may not, also be a damping of dynamics. In other words, what appears to be a loss of fine phasing and timing information. I can't provide the hardware analogy, but I'd characterize it as reducing an additive noise floor while convolving the signal with a broadening or smearing function. So there may well be a problem either at macro- or microlevels, but [some] solutions may be worse than the problem. And of course, this is all second hand conjecture as to causes. The sonic effects may be due to something else entirely. Cable issues could stand a large research budget.

Cables have been researched extensively in both aerospace and computer science, but I suppose you'd have to say, with different objectives. Not with respect to audible effects, and not for the highly 'experimental' geometries/materials tried out by audio cable designers. Some audio companies do use designers with this background and make extensive use of modelling (e.g. Nordost, according to their website). But it would cost serious money to study what the effects of, say, mechanical resonance do in physical and electrical terms, and there are no percentages in it unless it affects something besides audio.

I wonder also how many sonic effects are just due to poor construction and quality control in audio cable manufacture.

Hi Tvad,

I've got access to an extensive library of technical journals at work- I'll try to find some time (maybe friday afternoon) to see if there is a body of literature in them that might be relevant.

I recall reading that participants in Audio Engineering Society meetings have explored this issue in the past, but have not seen write-ups- if you are inclined, that might be a direction to look into. Perhaps there is a proceedings journal or maybe even a peer-reviewed journal.

Signal propagation characteristics in printed circuit boards are pretty extensively documented- perhaps there are useful analogies here as well.

Tracing back from Audioholics, there is a website by Rob Elliott that has some detailed articles and measurements- there are several references cited that might be worth digging up:

Elliott Site

Then, there's always Google...

Anyways, as far as I'm concerned, no apologies necessary- the more approaches that can be brought to bear on bringing some clarity to the whole cable arena, the better.