About Musical Wire

“I’ve been a music lover and electronics enthusiast since high school, through University and to nowdays. Back in the late 90’s I had a fellow who was an audiophile just like myself. One day he bought himself a new amp and invited me for auditioning. We listened to the music for a couple hours and then he showed me a trick. He removed the cables from his speakers, connected some other ones and turned the music back on. There was a distinct difference! More mids, more volcal, tighter bass and clearer highs… The change wasn’t like if he replaced his speakers, but the difference was clearly definite.

I was a bit confused. Before that day, if someone told me to connect my speakers by something other than generic cable from a local electric store and that those cables influence the sound, I would have advised him to go to a doctor and have his head examined. But the fact is the fact, and if there is a clear evidence, there must be a physical explanation. As a physicist, I started to explore this phenomenon. It had been five years of experiments with audio cables, dozens of constructions, various materials, comparisons with renown brand cables and attempts to do better. Some of my cable constructions were good enough, some gave me weird results, but all this was like gambling. I don’t like gambling, especially in science. I felt that there must be an explanation to these phenomena, and if so, there must be a way to solve the problem with cable “sounding”. Besides, there was no principal sound quality gain in my cables compared to others in the market. Simple things like resistance, capacitance, inductance, dielectric constants, velocity of EM wave propagation did not correlate with the experiments and seemed to have negligible effect on sound quality. Audio cable manufacturers also seemed to have no real clue for this. The “science base” for their products was, and still is, rather a marketing move, an attempt to explain the effects that they empirically get, with “generally understandable” physics. That was not good enough for me.