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What is your overall philosophy regarding cables?


I only decided to enter this field after I bypassed the interconnects between my preamp and amp, which showed me much music was being lost in the cables I was using. My goal has always been to eliminate the losses and colorations of cables rather than producing some special effect to suit my or someone else's taste or equipment. My reference has always been a direct connection and I believe that the common practice of evaluating cables by simply swapping them leads to confusion and cable designs with strange sound effects rather than higher fidelity.


I feel that the difference between my approach and others is that I start by determining exactly what I want the cables to do (sound like a direct connection) and I use the simplest and most effective methodology (bypass testing and comprehensive research) to achieve those objectives.

The Starlight 6 digital audio cable that I sent you is a good example of my methodology. My experience with the first outboard DAC (one of the first Theta prototypes) and my discussions with its designer in the mid 1980s taught me that having a faster current rise time reduced jitter, which led me to 20 years of optimizing conventional designs for faster rise time. I recently created the new Starlight 6 design from scratch, which truly
minimizes current rise time. BTW, Gold Starlight 6 is a bigger step up from the Starlight 6 than I could imagine before hearing it.


Wireworld cables have pretty much used the same geometry i.e. Symmetrical Coaxial, until recently. Why the change? What did you discover?


I was simply using an adaptation of the most effective existing design, which originated in the 1930s until I developed the expertise to design something better from scratch. That milestone took me about 25 years of continuous research!


What have you found to be the most important characteristics in a cable design?


The basic conductive profile of a cable, which is largely a function of electromagnetic field effects, is the most consistently audible and consistently neglected parameter of cables. That single elementary relationship causes most of the tonal and spatial anomalies that differentiate cables.


I had read in another review that you stated that there is an electrical relationship between an interconnect and speaker cable. Please elaborate. I've more or less noticed this myself over years of mixing and matching various brands of cable, which I've found to be unpredictable and ultimately pointless in my opinion.


The most obvious marker for the basic electrical profile I mentioned above is the frequency at which a cable transitions from predominantly resistive to predominantly inductive. For an interconnect and speaker cable to have complimentary tonal characteristics, the interconnects transition frequency must be about four times the transition frequency of the speaker cable. While such combinations of colored cables can produce a relatively balanced sound, they still introduce much more coloration and dynamic compression than neutral cables.


Your power cables are unique in that they are the only ones I'm aware of that are designed by geometry and materials to act as low-pass filters. You also state that they dampen resonances. Please elaborate. I have consistently noticed that power cables seem to have a greater influence on a system's performance than interconnects/speaker cables. Any thoughts as to why? Or perhaps you disagree.


I agree with you on the audibility of power cords. The reason is that audio component power supplies are not nearly effective enough at rejecting noise in the audible frequency range. Since there is a substantial amount of noise in the audible range (60Hz harmonics, resonance etc.), the common approaches to high-end power cord design mostly redistribute that energy into different parts of the spectrum, producing all kinds of sound effects. My approach is to minimize the degradation and sound effects by reducing the noise across the audible range. Our power cords perform as complex filter networks with absorption, phase cancellation and power factor correction functions generated by their complex structure and unique materials.