Ribbon cables don’t have consistent capacitance to a ground reference for each wire. This is why I didn’t build one. They are several “different” cables in parallel. Wires closer together have higher capacitance than the ones farther apart. If we FOLD the ribbon capacitance goes way up. The fact that all the wires in a ribbon cable aren’t the same distance apart from every other wire in the cable is a problem I wanted to avoid.
Shielded “ground plane” digital ribbon cable has a mesh ground plane under the flat ribbon as a ground, to evenly distribute the ground as best possible but and it raises capacitance. The insulation material and thickness is used to set the IMPEDANCE. Good speaker cable likes to have each polarity identical to one another as this is AC. Most high speed ribbon cables pulse DC referenced to a ground and we hope each wire sees the same ground so the voltage is the same value referenced to that ground. We can’t use this kind of cable for AC signals too well. Sure, it will “work” and make noise, but not as well as it should.
Not sure where you get the idea ribbon cables are better at transients. R, L and C don’t know what the cable’s construction is, but speakers do know their bulk values and how that is presented. Cable becomes part of the speaker seen by the amp which can’t tell one from the other. The amp sees a different network.
There is no magic to this. Tubes do voltage well, not so much current. This is by the design of a tube, after all. No feedback likes resistive loads and Magnepan type planers offer a more resistive load with a lower phase angle (reactance) than an electrostatic speaker. This easy load suits low feedback amps. But, electrostatic and ribbon type need lots of CURRENT so it is hard to drive them at a decent price with tubes for that reason. Read Magnepan’s literature, it’s been there for years.
WBT and like binding posts have to match a wide variety of cables. There are terminal strips all through the inside of a speaker, not just the binding posts.
Best,
Galen Gareis
