STEALTH Audio? (Wild stuff...)

[Arenith]

Right, thank you, that’s very understandable.

So then, to “slow” the higher frequencies to line up more linearly with lower freqs means we have to sufficiently increase the conductor’s impedance towards its surface? …Why then do we so often see the opposite being done, with a silver plating for example giving the high range an even faster highway and a larger differential of impedance compared to the core? I assume skin effect here is negligible since we are talking about audio range.
Slowing the high range, boosting the lower range, I guess this is all to be understood relatively, we want a smoothly leveled curve and I wager having this is more important for sound quality than at what impedance we have this at?
There are pure carbon conductor completely metal-free cables and they obviously “slow” the signal compared to metal, but apparently they have merits in conjunction with synergy. They might have a more level curve? Something about them is obviously unique to make them excel in high end systems!
To speculate more on the notion of their possibly uniquely leveled curve, there is talk of them being liquidy and smooth sounding, what if that’s actually the more natural (heh) presentation for the ears? Such adjectives do lead me to think they might slow the high range.
A.J.Van den Hul knows their secrets but he might be reluctant to reveal them in the form of a paper on them. (Though he’s explicitly not after money…)

For example if we have each individual sufficiently thin strand of a whole conduit insulated and we have a number of copper and silver strands in a proportion, will they sum to slow/boost the spectrum according to proportion, as in, a curve that’s such easily optimizable? Should we need a variable for the gauges of the strands also? Will these variables help, if optimized?
(I see these adverts of such “varistrand” conductors and as is seen with the Stealth cabling, sometimes a certain proportion of copper and silver strands is used. Here, even specific “component conduits” with differing structure from the main conductor assembly are used, the silver helixes… These cables are obviously designed heavily with ear so they must have thought to have a number of these helixes added for a sought sonical change. Here we’re led to the idea of the sound signature of a singular silver helix, interesting. I call it a component conduit because this cable is comprised of quite the lot of components really, we’ve steered far from the concept of just a wire.

[Arenith]

So, comparatively good. What a price differential!
I do understand paying big bucks for a slight difference in flavour when the so-called quality all in all is as good as it gets at this time.
When you’re a god you can’t go higher, there’s only qualitative change left to be done!

[rower30]

The 40 micro-inch silver plate is too thin to impact fundamentals, only the very high order harmonics. Yes, those high order harmonics do lend a hand adding realism to the sound(s). But the change with TPC verses SPTPC is in the minutia compared to the Vp linearity. Certainly you are right that when frequencies hit out ears changes the ambience of what we hear. Right or wrong it is a choice we make as good or bad and thus it is easy for me to support your choices of any cable. We simply try to better define “how” our work based on current practices we know to be on the table as true till proven otherwise.

It all adds up as you improve each area. My big question is how copper science impacts what we hear, and it does. Much more than I ever anticipated until I designed a fair comparison for me, and you. All we can do is say we don’t know WHY a change is copper grains and resistivity (what we can measure) cause such a change in sound and no, lower resistivity and grains aren’t “always” the best sounding so we can’t go by just that.

All metals can be designed to work better at audio, not just copper. There are also ways to tune cables like drivers in a speaker for frequency ranges. This is really hard to do, but is backed by the science and applies to all metals.

Don’t forget that sound engineer’s tune the OUTPUT to compensate for the signal path and thus some of the bad is EQ’ed. But, playing with the ampitude isn’t the same as adjusting the time based linearity. Time based issues are devils to work out.

We do the best we can and try to be open and transparent about what’s happening and if that’s a benefit to you. All changes are calculation and measurement backed or we won’t do them. This seems unusual to high-end audio but it is how Belden designs ALL of our cables. So nothing new here. The chart above is almost 40 years old. We do know about low frequency cable design, and the only way to see if that helps is to try them.

Best,
Galen