Oy!!
Gordon and Tom: Bruce Brisson holds the patents for time-aligned interconnect. He is the KING of multistrand. Monster Cable still makes his original design (because that's the only one Bruce patented when he was working for them!!) Straightwire and Audioquest and a few others license his patents. In fact, if you go to the MIT website, the patent numbers in the technical section
http://www.mitcables.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=88 actually
link to the USPO files (you'll need a little tiff plug-in to view the drawings) you can see his patented design for cable and other stuff along with those "boxes" which I'll get to shortly. But the bottom line (and this is Mr. Brisson's explanation, NOT MINE!) is that when two or more gauges of stranded (and separately insulated) wire are used in an interconnect, one can actually force different frequencIes to favor travelling in certain gauge wire rather than others. For instance, due to skin effect, high freq. likes the fine fuzzy wires, while lo-freq prefers travelling thru the thicker gauges. Since hi-freq can travel faster on the surface, it would get to the other end of the IC sooner than the lo-freqs. UNLESS you could make the hi-freqs. have to travel FARTHER, which you do by winding the fuzzy wire AROUND the thick wire THUS MAKING IT LONGER!! This
does create a cable with a lot of capacitance! However since it is a (relatively) short IC carrying very small signal and driving not a mechanical device (like a speaker) but only a tube or ss input, it will not have much effect on the frequency curve of the signal .
It's NOT THE SAME FOR SPEAKER CABLES! Too much capacitance can alter the frequency contour of the signal, which is a
strong signal and drives a real world mechanical (speaker) load. Also, too much inductance (like when you down-shift to slow the car) can reduce the damping factor and affect woofer performance.
Brisson extended his ideas about IC design to speaker cable design, which in hindsight perhaps wasn't necessary or even desireable. The two
most stranded SC's are the MIT and the Cardas, followed closely by Straightwire, Audioquest, Transparent, Nordost -- that I'm aware of, and many that I'm not. In an effort to reverse the effects of capacitance (and inductance) on frequency response in their speaker cables, MIT and Transparent and others have added these "network boxes" to electrically neutralize the capacitance/inductance before it gets into the speaker crossover -- which of course begs the question "Why make highly stranded speaker cable in the first place?".
The solid core crowd can certainly crow about their products' advantages, And frankly, although there are some
disadvantages, they are mostly of a practical nature (like really stiff and hard to manage) but they do deliver great sound -- as I'm finding out auditioning the new Purist Audio 'Provectus' SC (~$7000 for 2.5 m) Next will be the Virtual Dynamic cable, which is comparable in spec and construction, but less than half the price! I am looking for these cables to produce NEW performance qualities in my CLS's, not just BETTER this or LESS of that; Here's how I explained it to Alber Porter who lent me the demo pair:
My auditioning solid-core low capacitance SC is not meant to be a "taste test". I want to see if solid core, separated-run SC's will provide electrostats with any new performance attributes, as opposed to simply making incremental improvements to the existing ones (or not ;-)
Anyway, having lived with these speakers for over 17 years, I'm certain I'll hear if there are qualitative changes -- that's what I'll be primarily listening for. In the case of my speakers, it could be things like:
- 10Hz additional bass extension
- smoother at the very top, so the softening switch can be defeated
- higher SPL at the same gain = a virtual increase in efficiency
- comb filtering no longer audible at any level
I'm only aware of two other makers of solid core, single crystal, separate run SC's. I wanted to hear the Provectus first, since the rest of my system is all-Purist.
So far, I'm excited by the sound -- and mind you, my Venustas are very low capacitance cables ~20 pF/foot, but not ZERO! And the demo set of Provectus will need another 50 - 100 hours to settle in, but the CLS's are loving it so far, and so am I.
. Besides, whether he knows/admitis it or not, his creation of such great sounding speakers and electronics proves something else is going on with him beside simple number crunching!
