Do explanations matter if playback improves? Designers need theories to navigate. If results are positive, it matters naught whether theories and related explanations are 100% factual. Wherever hifi gets more persuasive, accelerated aging, quantum tunneling or cryogenics are just words. Someone sweated fussy details so we didn't have to. "Our pure copper RCA connectors plate in pure silver with no rhodium, nickel or other substrate which would introduce undesirable colorations. Our connectors are robust and heavy with extremely over-engineered wall thicknesses. This mitigates parasitic vibration at the component's RCA inlet. The cable's complex cotton composition further damps this crucial junction."
For their cables, LessLoss don't publish conductor purity. Six-nines hunters get zero hook. Louis feels that their complex C-MARC geometry and Entropic Process utterly dominate performance discussions over minute inclusions of non-copper molecules. So today's story takes his counter-rotating noise-cancelling Litz¹ geometry to the next level with accelerated deep aging. To scratch the surface a bit deeper, let's consult Wikipedia on a few terms.
¹ Litz is a particular multi-strand wire to carry alternating current at radio frequencies. It's designed to reduce skin effect² and proximity effect³ losses in conductors used at frequencies up to ~1MHz. It consists of many thin strands individually insulated and twisted or woven together following one of several carefully prescribed patterns often involving several levels. These winding patterns equalize the proportion of the overall length over which each strand is at the outside of the conductor. This distributes the current equally among the wire strands to reduce resistance.
The definition points out reduced impedance and less loss from skin and proximity effects by using ultra-thin conductors insulated individually which then array in very precise multi-layered builds. We extrapolate a time-proven recipe; manufacturing challenges from involved geometries getting more complex; and assembly challenges by having to strip enamel off each micro strand before terminations may solder on. You'd not want conductors that don't carry signal to undermine the counter-balanced principle pursued by the geometry in the first place. This requirement adds obvious labor. From Louis' choice of mercerized cotton rather than synthetic stabilizers plus the innate softening of the Entropic Process itself, we also expect unusual cable slinkiness not stiffness.
² The resistance of a conductor depends on its cross-sectional area. A conductor of larger area has lower resistance for a given length. But at high frequencies, alternating current does not penetrate deeply into conductors due to induced eddy currents. It tends to flow near the surface. This is skin effect. Current tends to flow in a surface layer and less through the center of the wire. Since less of the cross-sectional area is used, the wire resistance is greater. The higher the current's frequency, the smaller the depth to which the current penetrates. It 'crowds' into an increasingly smaller cross-sectional area along the surface so the wire's AC resistance increases with frequency. At low frequencies where skin depth is larger than the wire diameter, the skin effect is negligible. As frequency rises and skin depth gets smaller than wire diameter, skin effect becomes significant. At 60Hz, the skin depth of a copper wire is about 7.6 mm. At 6kHz it's 0.25mm. At 6MHz it's 25μm.
The takeaway is that a maximally thin conductor eliminates skin-effect losses across even high frequencies but now requires massively paralleled conductors to make up for the loss of raw conductor mass.
³ In two wires running parallel conducting the same alternating current, the magnetic field of the adjacent wire induces longitudinal eddy currents to concentrate the current in a narrow strip on the side adjacent to the other wire. This has a similar result as skin effect. The current bunches into a smaller cross-sectional area so resistance increases. One technique to reduce it is to place more conductive material near the surface by replacing a solid wire with a hollow copper tube. The tank coils of high-power radio transmitters are often made of silver-plated copper tubing. However tubing is not flexible and requires special tools to bend and shape.
Litz wire is another method. Each thin conductor is at less than skin depth so doesn't suffer appreciable skin effect loss. The magnetic fields generated by current flowing in the strands are in directions such that they have a reduced tendency to generate an opposing electromagnetic field in the other strands. For the wire as a whole, skin effect and associated power losses at high-frequency applications reduce. The ratio of distributed inductance to distributed resistance increases relative to a solid conductor.
The takeaway seems to be that its chosen geometry's precision and consistency are key to optimize a Litz wire's particular advantages. By extending to radio frequencies far beyond human hearing, how should one imagine these advantages to play out for the audible spectrum of an analog interconnect?
In a digital interconnect meanwhile which transfers very high-frequency signal, the concept's innate parameters would seem ideally spec'd.
C-MARC interconnects come in RCA and XLR versions.
"We previously used the Xhadow RCA plug and removed the magnetic metal spring contacts from its ground connection. These added a slight 'twing' to the sound which now is gone because we adopted the German ViaBlue connector instead. For the RCA C-MARC Entropic Process cable, we discard all of its parts except the electrical contacts themselves. Thus no aluminum remains, no metal-on-metal contact. We even discard additional plastic parts which accompany the use of the stock ViaBlue barrels. We replace all of these with our laser-engraved Wenge hardwood chucks below." This upshot looks like a deliberate reduction of metals then absence of plastics in favor of natural materials like cotton and wood. The only plastic left would seem to be these translucent name and version indicator sleeves. As it turns out, that photo shows the speaker cable.
"The RCA version will be void of plastic labels because all insignia now laser engrave into our wood barrels. These are the LessLoss logo, C-MARC designation, Entropic insignia and directional arrow from source to destination. It's imperative to adhere to this direction lest one won't remotely appreciate the cable's actual performance." Going Wenge also makes for a multi-step production affair just for that part.
Laser engraving.
