Engineering and the Audiophile

The argument between engineers and audiophiles has raged for a long while, and not without reason. Many audiophile designs of wire and cable products are strange and fanciful. Some vendors seem to have no consistent approach, producing a menagerie of product lines with wildly different physical attributes. And the engineering rationale for these designs is usually either too obscure for anyone to understand or entirely absent. But the audiophile still hears what he hears, whether it can be accounted for or not.

  The Iconoclast Behind Iconoclast

Imagine, then, having a foot in both camps. Galen Gareis, a now-retired product development engineer working at the Belden Engineering Center in Richmond, Indiana, has decades of experience in designing practical precision cabling for a wide variety of professional applications -- but at the same time he is a high-end audio enthusiast. When he began to evaluate different audio cables, he heard differences for which he could not fully account. An engineer confronted with that sort of puzzle has to ask: "why?" All cable design problems are problems in optimization, because the laws of physics don't allow one to create the ideal imaginary cable, with no resistance, no reactance, and no propagation delay; but if you don't know what you're trying to optimize, you're flailing in the dark. And so Galen turned those decades of experience to the task of re-examining conventional audio cabling, and understanding what those designs succeeded and failed at doing.

  Cable Design is R, L and C...and?

A standard approach to any problem in audio cabling begins with some fundamental measurable attributes of wire and cable: R (resistance), L (inductance) and C (capacitance). But Galen came to believe that while these factors account for much of what goes on in a cable, it is still possible for cables with the same R, L and C to have different sounds. The difference, to a great extent, comes down to time -- that some factors which are not taken fully into account in measuring overall R, L and C do affect the relative speeds of parts of the signal as they travel down the signal path. For example, while VP (velocity of propagation) is typically stated as a constant, it actually varies, and varies substantially, with frequency within the audio band. Ideally, one wants every part of a signal to travel at the same speed, and Galen looked to ways to mitigate and balance frequency-dependent effects upon signal timing. His analysis and conclusions, and resulting cable designs, are set out at length in his series of design papers.

  Doing it Right the First Time

Improving home audio systems is so often an iterative process that the non-enthusiast can see it as almost an addiction: there's always something a little better, always another tweak on the horizon, and behind that, one more tweak that hasn't even been thought of yet. That may, in fact, be why so many product lines in this field are so diverse and confusing: radically different designs from product to product always hold out the possibility of some improvement, and with no technical rationale for any of the approaches on offer, who can say what new cables will hold? But that's a way to sell cables more than it is a way to improve systems.

Iconoclast will never serve up that sort of confusion. Each of our core products -- speaker, RCA and XLR -- has a single design concept; the second generation of each adds to the number of conductors, while preserving the same architecture as the original. And though three material choices are offered, the electricals for all three are the same -- if you hear a difference between them, it's a matter of conductor material only, not of some design departure. The object, simply, is to produce a cable so good that it will be the last cable you'll ever want to buy. Rather than sell you newer and newer versions, we're happy to make the sale once; though we do hope you'll tell your friends.

  Submitted for Your Approval

These designs are all, in conventional terms, impractical. They represent optimization of design constrained only by what can feasibly be manufactured, without regard for cost of manufacture: pure engineering, unconstrained by budget. As a result, they are substantially more costly to make than conventional products are, while also being priced substantially below some of the stratospheric prices one sees in the high-end audio world. Whether this is an expense which will be worthwhile for you is precisely the judgment that only you, not we, can make; we can only encourage you to give Iconoclast a try.