What makes an interconnect sound like it does?

Everything. Quantity, type, and size of conductors; conductor materials; how the conductors are braided, twisted, etc.; insulation material; outer jacket; connector type, material, and design; method of termination and materials used; type and amount of heat shrink. There are many others. Fine tuning often takes years of experimentation.

The termination, and for you flat earthers that believe that only gas tight crimp will do, I got news for ya, there's a darn good reason that the government spec's solder for it's termination joints. Repeatability and reliability. Only in theory is a crimped joint better.

The US spec's gold and silver clading or plating, and often times gold connectors, and SILVER Solder. Most high end critical signal or data transmission cables are high quality copper with silver plating.

So: What causes the sound differences is mostly termination and last: it's the length and the capacitance, reactance, impedance, resistanct, inductance that either adds or subtracts from the signal that colors the sound.

Which is why many poeple who don't understand what the cable is doing chase and spend many $$$ finding the exact coloration that perks up their system. Match you impedances on the components upfront, buy quality copper and silver solder to locking connectors and the interconnect game comes to an end. Since your springing for maybe a couple of bucks go whole hog and silver plate the cable and hey use teflon foamed insulation, twist, braid, etc, what ever floats you boat via the snake oil in whatever add you've taken a fancy to, add inexpensive locking WBT type RCA's from PE and your out maybe $15 and an hour of time.

But if your components impedances are mismatched I suggest fixing the real issue prior to chasing down big bucks in interconnects. You did impedance match you components, right!!! A nasty little secret that very few salons will tell you about. Even in the same manufacturer and family the impedances may not be matched. Ask the dealer you buy from, and if he can't tell you, get away fast.

loontoon,

Don't forget shielding types and configurations, as well as vibration management in the overall cable structure. These are very important considerations in both the sonic performance, and the noise floor performance.

And don't forget that an IC that is PERFECT in one place in your system may not work well at all in another. Just thought I'd throw that in to help ease your choices in wire.

Enjoy,
Bob

Loontoon,

As counter-intuituive as is may sound, I don't believe you *really* want to impedance match your components. Modern solid-state devices transfer voltage between products, not power. Optimum power transfer requires impedance matching. Optimum voltage transfer does not.

Today’s products have high input impedances and low output impedances. These are compatible with each other. Low impedance output stages drive high impedance input stages. This way, there is no loading, or signal loss, between stages. No longer concerned about the transfer of power, today’s low output/high input impedances allow the almost lossless transfer of signal voltages.

For example, the positive and negative outputs of the driving unit have an output impedance labeled ROUT. Each input has an impedance labeled RIN. Typically these are around 100 Ω for ROUT and 20k Ω for RIN. Georg Ohm taught us that 100 Ω driving 20k Ω (looking only at one side for simplicity) creates a voltage divider, but a very small one (-0.04 dB). This illustrates the above point about achieving almost perfect voltage transfer, if impedance matching is not done.

If it is done, you lose half your signal. Here’s how: impedance matching these units involves adding 100 Ω resistors (equal to ROUT) to each input (paralleling RIN). The new input impedance now becomes essentially the same as the output impedance (100 Ω in parallel with 20 kΩ equals 99.5 Ω), therefore matching. Applying Ohm’s law to this new circuit tells us that 100 Ω driving 100 Ω creates a voltage divider of ½. That is, ½ of our signal drops across ROUT and ½ drops across RIN, for a voltage loss of 6 dB. We lose half our signal in heat across ROUT. Not a terribly desirable thing to do.

Of course, I could be wrong. What the hell do I know?