We laugh at this most ancient hook up wire, but perhaps it's instructive to remember the first Monster Cable speaker wire was this identical construction with "better" copper and fancy connectors.
My first introduction to the impact different construction would have came from a demo I attended by Mike Moffat. Moffat, now one of the owners of Schiit Audio (along with Jason Stoddard), was a technician at Absolute Audio in Santa Ana California. Mike demonstrated to Stan and I the difference between Monster zip cord and Cobra Cables in a truly blind test. Mike wouldn't even tell us what he was doing, only that we should just "trust him" and see if we heard a difference. Boy, oh boy did we hear a difference.
Cobra Cable was what we refer to today as Litz wire; many fine strands of insulated wire woven at right angles to each other to reduce skin and proximity effects as well as inductance. And it was just the first of many designs still in use today.
It seems to me that the common use of long parallel conductors, as you find in zip cord, was so detrimental to sound quality with many amplifier/speaker combinations, that an entire industry sprouted up to replace it. In fact, I can't think of a single other trigger I could point to that sparked such a revolution.
Sometimes the things we take for granted–once questioned–spark industries to fix them.
The long tail of Zip Cord
We laugh at this most ancient hook up wire, but perhaps it's instructive to remember the first Monster Cable speaker wire was this identical construction with "better" copper and fancy connectors.
My first introduction to the impact different construction would have came from a demo I attended by Mike Moffat. Moffat, now one of the owners of Schiit Audio (along with Jason Stoddard), was a technician at Absolute Audio in Santa Ana California. Mike demonstrated to Stan and I the difference between Monster zip cord and Cobra Cables in a truly blind test. Mike wouldn't even tell us what he was doing, only that we should just "trust him" and see if we heard a difference. Boy, oh boy did we hear a difference.
Cobra Cable was what we refer to today as Litz wire; many fine strands of insulated wire woven at right angles to each other to reduce skin and proximity effects as well as inductance. And it was just the first of many designs still in use today.
It seems to me that the common use of long parallel conductors, as you find in zip cord, was so detrimental to sound quality with many amplifier/speaker combinations, that an entire industry sprouted up to replace it. In fact, I can't think of a single other trigger I could point to that sparked such a revolution.
Sometimes the things we take for granted–once questioned–spark industries to fix them.
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