- Higher inductance than it should have and is random to the UL min wall and wire spacing. It is NOT designed for audio, it is designed for 60 Hz power safety.
- Capacitance has no design metric either, it simply falls where it does to meet UL minimum wall requirements. It is not used as a managed attribute to improve the analog performance.
- Higher DCR than necessary. We can at least use 14 AWG or heavier zip cord and fix one attribute. We want the signal across the load, not the cable. A good cable should NOT modulate the load signal with voltage being dropped across your speaker cable.
- PVC insulation degrades, light molecular weight plastisizer migrates out allowing it to yellow and crack.
- Poor impedance sweep than necessary and far higher than is possible.
- Virtually zero attempt to manage the Vp differential (group delay) with frequency.
- Current efficiency in the wire is poor as it also ignores tertiary attributes that follow along with Vp linearity improvements using multiple small wires.
- Rs swept attenuation is much higher than idealized analog designs.
Below is what standard design zip cord (or a simple twisted pair) wire does to frequency group delay at audio. Ignore the 9269 that is a 93-ohm RF coaxial cable. Do we care if the group velocity is that bad? All frequencies don’t arrive at the end of the cable at the same time. In analog we can’t fix this, ever, but we can minimize it. Digital can reshape the data to perfection no problem as it is distorted by group delay and attenuation. All digital is reshaped by the NIC card as it arrives.
The IMPEDANCE graph is a typical zip / twisted pair impedance. It is 600 OHMS or higher at 1 KHz and over 1200-ohms at 100 Hz. This impedance rise is caused by the decrease in Vp across frequency down toward DC. As Vp goes DOWN the impedance goes UP. Zip cord doesn’t even care about that as it is a 60 Hz AC power signal design.
If you want to get closer to the speaker load impedance (2-16 ohms range) you are a long way off with zip cord. Better analog designs are less than 300 ohms at 100 Hz.
There is a lot we can do to get better measuring speaker cable through the audio range that is as factual as why zip cord works the way it does. All the exact same measurement and design formula techniques are used. Better is better and through the analog frequency range that is much harder to do than at RF for digital. We have a constantly changing Vp (dielectric constant) from 1 MHz on down to DC where it is zero by definition. We can improve that with managed wire size, DCR, L and C.
It is a fair question to ask. We show you how ICONOCLAST is designed and how it works. You should ask that very question.
Best,
Galen
