Originally Posted by
Barry
First of all, I don’t believe cables have any intrinsic sound of their own. If changes in sound are perceived, then this is entirely down to how the cable interacts with the equipment between which it connects, and how well it screens or shields the delicate musical signals, with all the subtle information contain within them, from corruption by external electrical interference (from whatever source). Even having accepted that the interaction can have acoustic effects, unless your system is quite unusual, these effects will be small. Lets examine this in more detail.
One can quite reasonably say that any audio cable can be characterised by LCR measurements (pace Frank). That is, the construction and quality of the materials used will be effectively summarised by these measurements. The resistance of the conductors used and that of the insulation used as well as any dielectric loss will be represented by R. Likewise the geometry of the interconnect will represented by both L and C. Shielding efficacy is a little more difficult to quantify and depends on both the construction of the shield and of the material from which it is made. Strictly speaking it is quantified by a parameter called the surface transfer impedance that can be both calculated and measured. Measurements at the interfering frequencies expected (those radiated by switched-mode power supplies as well as AM broadcasts), are almost impossible to make owing to the long wavelengths involved, but I will come to this later.
Simply considering the LCR values, for virtually all cables these are sufficiently good so that unless the interconnect is made of the most peculiar of materials or has a strange geometry, or it is used in an unusual system, there should be virtually no difference between sensibly designed interconnects. I’ll provide a few illustrative figures.
OK, so we’ve got the LCRs out of the way,
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