The starting point for making a good Hi-Fi cable

A particular subsequent treatment of OFHC copper allows the orientation of the base crystals, obtaining a natural "towards" through which the flow of electrons is facilitated. In this way, the direction that the signal will prefer to take as it passes is identified, increasing the electrical, and therefore sound, performance of the copper wire.The cable obviously also works in reverse, but with audibly different sound performance. This is why our cables have an arrow stamped on the connector, which clearly allows them to be identified as the source (instrument) or target (mixer/amplifier).

An important effect to consider is the skin effect: as the frequency increases, in fact, the signal that passes through a copper conductor tends to use the surface layers (skin) and not the central part, with the result that, as as the frequency increases, the conductor becomes virtually thinner and has less current-carrying capacity. Even if in a barely perceptible way, the cable "sounds" less at the high frequencies reproduced, reducing them. A single cable does not allow us to clearly perceive the problem, but how many cables do we use in our set-up?

The solution to the question is to use cables with a reduced ratio between area and circumference. This means, in practice, using a much thinner cable than those used by other manufacturers, which however has the disadvantage of carrying little current.

Since a thin conductor constitutes, in itself, a problem, we circumvented the obstacle, re-evaluating the thickness as a positive element since by using many of them, we would essentially have obtained two very important requirements: flexibility and shielding. In fact, the large number of conductors used together can be traced back to a single one with a large section but characterized by a flexibility that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Furthermore, the external sheath of the cable will have a greater number of strands, with a very dense mesh, so the cable's immunity to electromagnetic interference, the Achilles' heel of many cables on the market, will be considerably increased. We talk about electromagnetic interference because a cable crossed by an alternating current produces a magnetic field that is "induced" in all the other cables close to it, audibly in the form of hums and/or distortions.

Generally, to reduce this problem, the conductors are twisted together, obtaining a partial cancellation effect on the overall field produced by the two conductors (being in phase opposition, the two electromagnetic fields cancel each other out).

The quality of the external copper braid, or shielding, will then eliminate even the small residues of the electromagnetic field due to the geometry of the twisting (pitch). So think about what the loss of quality can be when in the studio, or on stage, there are dozens of cables running close together or intertwined. In the laboratory we have reproduced electromagnetic fields that rarely occur under normal conditions; our cable performed absolutely flawlessly.

Such effective shielding also has the advantage of making our product particularly immune to noises induced by handling. Do you know anyone who stays perfectly still during a live performance?

Another relevant aspect concerns one of the electrical characteristics of the cable, the capacity. In practice, the cable can be equated to a capacitor which, together with the impedance of the source, forms a low-pass filter and limits the range of useful frequencies.

We have measured many commercially available cables, finding capacitance levels that attenuate high frequencies starting from 5 kHz by up to 3 or 4 dB, making the sound dark and dull. To ensure that phase differences and the drop in frequency response above 20 kHz remain within acceptable values, our cable has a bandwidth close to 100 kHz, an uncommon quality.

And the connections?

They are the crucial point for good signal transmission, as they physically bring touching metal parts into contact; also considering the roughness of the boundaries of the individual crystals and the oxidation of the surfaces, the electrical conduction can be very low and generate distortions.