By arriving in that stout Skeleton flight case, today's Gekko leashes made quite the entrance. From the stock photos, I already knew that their purple cotton was deep purple like the Rock group. What I didn't expect was the sheer girth of the speaker cables accompanied by very low weight and beaucoup slinkiness. We've all heard of and seen high-mass turntables like miniature oil rigs. There also exists a cable philosophy which results in unusually stiff heavy specimens all prepped to bench-press lighter components off a rack. Boban's were the polar opposite. They were low-mass cables if such a category exists. Could/would any of it predict sonics as in, low mass equals greater speed?
Color coding for channel identification is via different wood stains or species. A directional arrow on the RCA barrel shows intended electron flow.
The ± identifiers for the speaker cables are these color-coded cotton jackets, directional markers on the spade barrels.
"Here is a photo of the 'naked' twisted Purple Haze interconnect. The red and white conductors and greenish cotton braids are twisted together in the same direction. They alternate red conductor, cotton braid, white conductor, cotton braid. The two conductors run in parallel but separating them with cotton braids increases their distance to reduce capacitance. Cotton insulation is second in its dielectric properties only to air. The dielectric constant of air is 1.0, cotton is 1.3 and Teflon is 2.0. The use of cotton insulation rather than Teflon further reduces capacitance and inductance. Cotton also plays an important role as a cushion in reducing unnecessary vibrations." This preference for cotton is mirrored by LessLoss and their cables for Boenicke.
About the speaker cable, "both positive cream and negative purple legs have 8 x 0.5mm pure 99.99% silver wires individually braided in Teflon. Two additional conductors contain 0.3mm silver and 0.25mm gold-plated silver each braided in Teflon as well. These ten conductors are then twisted and covered in cream or purple polypropylene braids. Two additional braid ropes of identical thickness are added and all four ropes are twisted the same way as the interconnects to form the cable. In case of bi-wiring, the two plain ropes are replaced with two conductors. The cable is covered with three layers of polypropylene to cushion the wires. As we know, protecting conductors from external vibrations is very important. I learnt this when I started to make guitar cables. I would make a cable with two silver wires and cover them in heat shrink. When I knocked on the wires, they behaved like a microphone. I could talk into them and they would pick up my voice. I then pulled wires in cotton shoe laces and they wend dead quiet. Finally, I will soon be announcing distribution deals with Prana Distribution for the US and Red Leaf Audio for Canada."
