April
2022

Sherlock and a case of the curves?

Electrons don't fancy right angles. It's the upshot of what a designer specializing in hi-speed RF circuits told me. I looked into it more and learnt that he and his kind indeed take pains to design a PCB such that its traces change direction gradually so in smooth curves like a race track. Squares are for squares. No car can navigate 'em. Apparently electrons can but prefer otherwise.

"Okay" you think. "So what?"

Eat your bananas. Get your daily potassium. Yeah, that too. More to our point, spades connect at a 90° angle to our speaker's internal hookup wiring. Bananas are in-line fellows. They cause no kinks in the flow of electrons nor reflections in the wave's propagation.

"You can't be serious." Børresen's Z-01 speaker very much is. Its terminals don't even support spades. When I visited their Aalborg factory, I learnt that its people don't really spade it. This is why. Of course bananas and spades are funky connectors compared to pro-audio's locking SpeakOn. But out of the two, bananas would seem to have a legitimate advantage. And it's not being able to crank down on them until a socket wrench snaps.

If there's any moral here, it's not to cut corners? Since I prefer bananas' greater ease when reviewing, the argument has obvious appeal. Of course there's always trusting our ears. And sometimes practicality trumps idealism. It's why today's header ended in a question mark…