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The controversy of the copper foil cables: potentially the best cables - no one really know about

davidsrsb said:
The extra inductor has exactly the same slight low pass effect that one built inside most amplifiers has.
I think JV forgot to include it in his early designs and then made excuses about the sound quality to justify himself.
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My take is that he was simply trying to save a few pennies on his manufacturing costs! :)
 
davidsrsb said:
There are two kinds of tape cables. The individual ones have the problem that at higher frequencies the current concentrates on the edges due to skin effect, so fairly high resistance.
The "sandwich" type gives low inductance and high capacitance, so good at making several amplifiers go up in smoke.
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Skin effect really only matters at radio frequencies. Audio is too low to really suffer from this.
 
I have experimented with DIY cables big-time over the last few years, moving from coax to weird concoctions to shared earth between interconnects and finally to foils

for me, within my system, foils wipe the floor with all of them - interconnect side by side configuration, with speaker cable sandwiched parallel. Occasionally i take the interconnects to my friendly local dealer to compare to commercial options, and we stop at around £1000, with mine still prefered. Mine cost approx £8 for 1m pair interconnect

I also played around with phono plugs, and heard no real benefit from the top Eichmann bullets vs £1-each amazon basics - this turned out to be my biggest benefit, though, as i figured that solder might be both common to both plugs and also a limiting factor, so i designed & 3d-printed my own phono plugs, which 'formed' the copper foils into the live pin and return path, thus removing the need for solder, and this was better than any soldered plug or contact-fit i ever used

Because the foil is so cheap it was no issue to create the same cable with different widths - mundorf comes in various sizes, but i found that shaving the foil to a 9mm width for interconnects was best, although i suspect this is system dependent . I am still playing with the best speaker width

for anyone really interesting in trying out some designs, i strongly recommend the allan wright cable cookbook, if you can find one - i got mine late in the day, by which point my designs were pretty close to his best-in-class designs (i think i got lucky there, as i am no electrical engineer!), but there were some really good tips in the pages (brasso the copper before sealing with kapton, for example) and also some nice technical explanations of why they foils can perform so well.
 
I stop worring about 'cable effects' when moving my head an inch alters the sound by a somewhat more noticable amount. If I were to worry about this I'd need to use an old Victorian photographer's Head Clamp when sitting down to enjoy music. :)

In practice I've found it far easier to measure small changes due to - entirely understandable - cable 'effects' than to find myself botherd by the level of audible difference they may cause, when using fairly basic and common cables off reels.
 
x21 said:
Skin effect really only matters at radio frequencies. Audio is too low to really suffer from this.
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AGUYCALLEDSIMON said:
I have experimented with DIY cables big-time over the last few years, moving from coax to weird concoctions to shared earth between interconnects and finally to foils

for me, within my system, foils wipe the floor with all of them - interconnect side by side configuration, with speaker cable sandwiched parallel. Occasionally i take the interconnects to my friendly local dealer to compare to commercial options, and we stop at around £1000, with mine still prefered. Mine cost approx £8 for 1m pair interconnect

I also played around with phono plugs, and heard no real benefit from the top Eichmann bullets vs £1-each amazon basics - this turned out to be my biggest benefit, though, as i figured that solder might be both common to both plugs and also a limiting factor, so i designed & 3d-printed my own phono plugs, which 'formed' the copper foils into the live pin and return path, thus removing the need for solder, and this was better than any soldered plug or contact-fit i ever used

Because the foil is so cheap it was no issue to create the same cable with different widths - mundorf comes in various sizes, but i found that shaving the foil to a 9mm width for interconnects was best, although i suspect this is system dependent . I am still playing with the best speaker width

for anyone really interesting in trying out some designs, i strongly recommend the allan wright cable cookbook, if you can find one - i got mine late in the day, by which point my designs were pretty close to his best-in-class designs (i think i got lucky there, as i am no electrical engineer!), but there were some really good tips in the pages (brasso the copper before sealing with kapton, for example) and also some nice technical explanations of why they foils can perform so well.
Click to expand...

I remember talking to a couple of American Computer experts on the IBM stand at an Olympia show when I told them of skin effect they said in unison "like an inverted wave guide" if so does it only affect radio frequencies ? I don't know.

On my OTA Quad 57's I use twisted around each other cross-connected-coaxial speaker cable similar to that designed by Jon Risch using stranded center core but using Webro WF100 solid core, constructed using the Thorsten Loesch TNT UBYTE 2 diagrams to my mind using solid core & mesh combined they are very open handed with an even frequency response. I use pure soft silver phono leads most in air core coax with the center copper core pulled out or TNT "shoestring" type now air core coax is virtually unobtainium.

I had decide to quit whilst I was ahead, you have rekindled thoughts of foil speaker "cables" that were still surfacing occasionally, as I use a very stable valve power amp & rewired One Thing Audio "Widget's" the extra capacitance should not be a problem however since my wife suggested buying last week my New Hana ML cartridge & the necessary addition of a pair of SUT's in the case of my Croft phono stage by Mark Manwaring-White in Malvern going to wait a while before new acquisition's on my pension.

I had read of Foil speaker leads/cables years ago on several American sites I visit possibly before Goertz cable came out I believe Supra were first. AGUYCALLEDSIMON where is the best place to buy or obtain the the foil...
 
davidsrsb said:
I have to think about skin depth in railway track at 50 Hz in my day job.
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That read like an 'interesting' problem - so I did some cursory reading on my commute home - it is an interesting problem! A millimeter or so, give or take, depending on the steel composition. So high traction current is going to make for surprisingly-high current density at the surface, and steel is not a great conductor... er. um. Oh!
 
martin clark said:
So high traction current is going to make for surprisingly-high current density at the surface
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One reason why third rail systems use 750V DC.
Skin depth is not normally a problem in HiFi unless you are trying to use some strange cable geometry. Something like a wide ribbon cable with all the cores wired in parallel would be much higher resistance than expected
 
AGUYCALLEDSIMON said:
I have experimented with DIY cables big-time over the last few years, moving from coax to weird concoctions to shared earth between interconnects and finally to foils

for me, within my system, foils wipe the floor with all of them - interconnect side by side configuration, with speaker cable sandwiched parallel. Occasionally i take the interconnects to my friendly local dealer to compare to commercial options, and we stop at around £1000, with mine still prefered. Mine cost approx £8 for 1m pair interconnect

I also played around with phono plugs, and heard no real benefit from the top Eichmann bullets vs £1-each amazon basics - this turned out to be my biggest benefit, though, as i figured that solder might be both common to both plugs and also a limiting factor, so i designed & 3d-printed my own phono plugs, which 'formed' the copper foils into the live pin and return path, thus removing the need for solder, and this was better than any soldered plug or contact-fit i ever used

Because the foil is so cheap it was no issue to create the same cable with different widths - mundorf comes in various sizes, but i found that shaving the foil to a 9mm width for interconnects was best, although i suspect this is system dependent . I am still playing with the best speaker width

for anyone really interesting in trying out some designs, i strongly recommend the allan wright cable cookbook, if you can find one - i got mine late in the day, by which point my designs were pretty close to his best-in-class designs (i think i got lucky there, as i am no electrical engineer!), but there were some really good tips in the pages (brasso the copper before sealing with kapton, for example) and also some nice technical explanations of why they foils can perform so well.
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Would you be able to share the pictures of your foil cables? Really curious about the design you've chose, as well as the way - how you've attached the connectors to the foil.
Also would you be able to share the 3d design, you've mentioned above?
 
davidsrsb said:
Skin depth in copper is 2mm at 1 kHz, just 0.46mm at 20 kHz. The current will concentrate at the edges.
I have to think about skin depth in railway track at 50 Hz in my day job.
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Skin effect also reduces inductance with increasing frequency, you lose the internal flux linkages.
 
andriirad said:
Would you be able to share the pictures of your foil cables? Really curious about the design you've chose, as well as the way - how you've attached the connectors to the foil.
Also would you be able to share the 3d design, you've mentioned above?
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happy to share content, but maybe this should be moved to the DIY area?

I am making up a new set shortly, using my latest design - might be this weekend, so i will maybe start the post once i have some pictures etc.
my current design has the cables exiting the plugs at 90%, which was a more repeatable way of forming the live pin, but not so easy to route cables on small equipment boxes - this will be the first set i create where the cables exit right from the back of the plug - I might need to design & print something that makes the forming more reliable, so am not ready to share a photo quite yet

Actually, now i think about it, I might start the DIY post before i am ready to share images, as there was some interesting thinking that went into designing the phono plugs, to address what i saw as failings in the RCA standard, which might be of interest to others, and I'd be interested back to know what other folks think
 
AGUYCALLEDSIMON said:
happy to share content, but maybe this should be moved to the DIY area?

I am making up a new set shortly, using my latest design - might be this weekend, so i will maybe start the post once i have some pictures etc.
my current design has the cables exiting the plugs at 90%, which was a more repeatable way of forming the live pin, but not so easy to route cables on small equipment boxes - this will be the first set i create where the cables exit right from the back of the plug - I might need to design & print something that makes the forming more reliable, so am not ready to share a photo quite yet

Actually, now i think about it, I might start the DIY post before i am ready to share images, as there was some interesting thinking that went into designing the phono plugs, to address what i saw as failings in the RCA standard, which might be of interest to others, and I'd be interested back to know what other folks think
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That's sounds really interesting! Please, post here the link to your DIY thread, so anyone interested may follow your project.
 
Big John said:
I remember talking to a couple of American Computer experts on the IBM stand at an Olympia show when I told them of skin effect they said in unison "like an inverted wave guide" if so does it only affect radio frequencies ? I don't know.
.
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Cables *are* "wave guides". Just that conventional audio speaker types guide the EH fields around the metalwork rather than surrounding the EH fields. Your carpet doesn't mind or even notice. :)
 
martin clark said:
That read like an 'interesting' problem - so I did some cursory reading on my commute home - it is an interesting problem! A millimeter or so, give or take, depending on the steel composition. So high traction current is going to make for surprisingly-high current density at the surface, and steel is not a great conductor... er. um. Oh!
Click to expand...

FWIW The details of 'skin effect' currents inside the metal is analysed and described by various webpages I did to try and de-mystify the topic. Don't rely on old articles in Hi-Fi mags as their 'explanations' generally mess up and thus mislead. (pun alert! 8-])
 
I have exclusively used silver foil Interconnect cables in my system for a number of years, far superior to expensive Kimber kcag silver cables for example.
 
palacefan said:
I have exclusively used silver foil Interconnect cables in my system for a number of years, far superior to expensive Kimber kcag silver cables for example.
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Would you be able to take a picture of them? Very curious - what's your way of attaching the foil to the connectors?
 
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