From the Witch Hat Audio website:
“The Signal Conductor
If EMI could be seen as the evil dragon, the audio signal is King Arthur and the signal path to the speakers is like the quest for the Holy Grail. Hopefully, you’ll agree that there’s no point protecting hi
m from a dragon if he’s still got to pass over dangerous terrain, so how might we make his path easier for him?
This is where the signal conductor comes into play. For the Morgana, we went for Ohno Continuously Cast (OCC) Copper over the standard Oxygen Free Copper (OFC). To make OCC Copper it needs to be of extremely high grade known as 6N (99.9998% pure to be exact), which has half the impurities of OFC. As the name suggests it’s cast in such a way as to reduce the microscopic grain boundaries. Simply put, impurities and grain boundaries impede the flow of electrons leading to distortion and lag; therefore comparatively the OCC Copper has a very agile sound.
You may be wondering why we didn’t flow
(follow) suit with every other cable company and get it silver plated (or even wholly silver). Silver is used for
(delete for) because it’s marginally more conductive than copper and is thus better for signal transference. It can also reduce the skin effect where by
(whereby) high frequencies cause the current to gravitate to the edges creating capacitance, which in turn can lead to unwanted loss of detail and
(cause or introduce) imbalances.
Whilst it sounds great the price of better detail is brightness, a more fatiguing and cold sound that you may have experienced with silver and silver-plated cables. Naim designed and tweaked their amplifiers to work with copper cables and thus we find the sound a lot more natural and enjoyable. After all, we believe this is what Naim are about; you can get better resolution with other brands, but nothing gets your foot tapping like Naim!
Protecting the Signal
Now that King Arthur is on his way, we need to see what we can do about that dragon. One of the biggest differentiators for this cable over every other cable in the market is the insulator that we use to combat interference and skin effect. Unfortunately, it is also our most mysterious because as was common practice among Witches and Wizards of old who feared that their magic might get into the wrong hands, we feel we must keep this a secret.
What I can tell you about, however, is what we did with the 0v return. This conductor is an interesting one as it has 2 very important jobs. The first is to return a very low current back to the source device (or amplifier, power supply, etc) and carries both signal and power. This was a silly design idea from Naim as interference along here can get into the source and cause problems with timing and imaging. By using a very large conductor (which is a combination of the width of the cable and each individual signal conductor) voltage distortion is decreased and you get a much clear image.
The other job for this (as you have likely guessed from the image) is that by putting a current through it, it acts a
s a shield. The dual shielding not only means it is shielded from the outside world but also from the power conductors in the cable with 4 pin and 5 pin 240 variants. This was another design flaw of Naim’s originals (and why we developed the Hatpin range) because by allowing audio and power to go down the same line they created internal interference. For signal only cables you still get two layers of shielding to protect from EMI – and we could say four if we included the aluminium foil.
You may wonder why we went with the silver-plated shielding and not standard copper. Well the thing about audio is that sound quality is king, much of this understanding has been reached after a lot of testing and we feel that the silver-plated shielding is better then OFC without the draw backs discussed in the signal conductor.
Plugs
As King Arthur searches for the Holy Grail he must go through many transition stages before he is amplified as a person
(huh, amplified as a person?). Whilst we want these to be as smooth as possible they aren’t as important as the journey itself. This is how we feel about plugs, where we feel that 80% of the benefit comes from the cable and 20% from the plugs. They are definitely not something to be scoffed at, but it is hard for a small company to do the necessary R&D and manufacture custom plugs.
For the XLR and RCA plugs we have decided to go with ETI Technologies’ Kyro range because we found them to adopt a no-nonsense approach to products that is similar to ours. If you are interested in what they have to say about them feel free to check out their site, but we have found that they added a layer of stability, particularly in the low to mid-range and were worth adding to the cable.
As there aren’t any HiFi din plugs around in the various configurations that we require, we are considering the possibly of making our own, but this has yet to be confirmed.”
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Copy errors aside (my corrections are in red), I’ve got a 5 pin HatPin between my pre-amp and Hi-Cap and am very happy with it. If this new cable is an improvement then I’m very interested
.
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Oh, I also note that Witch Hat have spelt ‘dialectic’ incorrectly on the diagram of this new cables construction, and also, the ‘ETI Technologies’ RCA plugs referred to are the ‘Kryo’, not the ‘Kyro’...
