Thiel Audio Interview on Cables

Jim Thiel
Well, again, I agree that this will not be a problem with amplifier cable of sufficiently low resistance. And again I am just explaining why amplifier cable resistance needs to be low; why, say, 4 ohms is not sufficiently low.

So for both these reasons we need amplifier cable to have low resistance and the most straightforward way to get low resistance is to use a large gauge wire, but this causes a practical problem in that the wire gets very stiff and unbendable. Therefore stranded wire is used but this causes sonic problems because the current will pass from strand to strand and encounter non-linear, distortion producing extra resistance.

Audioholics
Non-linear distortion in a cable? We haven't found this to be true after extensive testing and calculations. This has been an unfortunate fallacy promoted by many exotic cable vendors for years, whom incidentally offer no measurable or analytical proof to justify these types of claims. I realize Thiel supports many high end dealers who sell exotic cables that market this fictitious claim, but you may wish to reconsider making such a declarative statement about this, especially in light of the inarguable proofs we offer rebuking this in the following articles:

How does strand interaction produce extra resistance? I don't understand.

We realize many exotic cable vendors buy solid core wire in bulk from manufacturers such as Belden and therefore attempt to rationalize its superiority by introducing pseudo sciences, but please realize over the past two years we have written extensive articles about cables, while demystifying many of the snake oil claims.

As a result, consumer awareness about cable snake oil is at an all time high. It would serve all manufacturers best interests to be more objective about cables and not support baseless claims to server dealer sales of exotic cabling. We have nothing against solid core wire, or expensive cables for that matter, providing that the manufacturer claims aren't without merit. As a result, many legitimate cable vendors advertise on our site and others have even updated their literature to be more factual-based on provable cable theory.

Please note our contributing staff (in addition to myself) includes a list of field experts such as Dr. Howard Johnson, Henry Ott and engineers from Wayne Kerr - a Leading Test Equipment Manufacturer

Jim Thiel
A "fix" for this is to separately insulate each strand but then you can have the problems caused by poor dielectrics (insulators) since good dielectrics cannot be made very thin.

Audioholics
What defines a good/poor dielectric for speaker cables? You may wish to review our article on this topic. Other than serving the role of insulation and controlling cable capacitance,cable dielectrics really serve no other role on speaker cables, which will influence measurements or sonics.

Jim Thiel
I agree that much of the promotional claims about amplifier cable is baseless and/or misleading and also that much high end cable is overpriced (sometimes drastically) in terms of performance. However, I believe that some cables do have detrimental effects on sound quality that are not explainable by resistance or inductance. Whether these almost always subtle distortions are caused by dielectrics, oxidation, bi-metal plating, etc are not determinable by me. But of course that something cannot be proved doesn't mean it does not exist.

Audioholics
Again I encourage you to review the article we authored on cable distortion. It clearly demonstrates there is no mechanism responsible for causing non linear distortions in wires. If there were, don't you think a credible source such as IEEE or experts in Electronics Fields and Waves would have authored a paper on this? To our knowledge, the only folks touting cable distortion are exotic cable manufacturers and supplementary cable forum cult hobbyists.

Jim Thiel
So, with this background, we come to internal speaker wire. What we do is, first, internally bi- or tri- wire all our speakers. This means that we have completely isolated the electrical current in the woofer circuit from that of the tweeter; there are no wires, even ground wires, in common between drivers, beginning right at the input terminals. The benefit of this isolation is that there cannot be any intermodulation, no matter how high the resistance of the internal wiring is. The next thing is to realize that, since we have eliminated intermodulation as a problem, low wire resistance is no longer necessary at all because the losses caused by resistance of the short lengths of internal wire is low and because any such losses can be corrected by adjusting other elements of the speaker's design, like crossover component values, driver magnet size, etc. In other words, we can engineer the speaker to have the correct response taking into consideration the small amount of resistance of the internal wiring.

But why would we bother having to take this into account? Why not just use larger, stranded wire? The reason is that by using smallish solid wire we can completely eliminate any distortions produced by stranding and/ or their insulation.

Audioholics
Again you may wish to reconsider this viewpoint since it lacks any scientific proof, merit or credibility. There is no proven distortion mechanism for wires. Using the best test gear on the market (Audio Precision 2) we have demonstrated no nonlinear mechanism exists for this to occur. If it did, how would engineers design sensitive test equipment, space probes etc if their wires were causing so much distortion? Even if measurable wire distortion did exist, it would not even be a 1/100 th of the magnitude of distortion induced by the drivers or circuit components. Wouldn't you agree?

Jim Thiel
Yes, I would agree that wire distortion would be 40 dB lower than usual driver distortion. (But we have reduced that by a factor of 10 also.) But even so this would not ensure that such distortion was inaudible. I don't care much if something is proven or not since my solution is of low cost. As I mentioned earlier I do believe there are sonic effects that I don't know how to measure and since I can eliminate this possibility for very little cost, I don't see why I would not do so.

Audioholics
Wire distortion 40dB lower than driver distortion!?! That's news to me. If this were true surely a simple measurement would demonstrate this. Again I defer you to an article we already conducted thorough testing of wire distortion for a wide assortment of cables and found nothing.

Let's figure a usual driver distortion of 1% or -40dB. If we look -40dB lower than that for cable distortion, we would need a resolution of -80dB. Please note that the accuracy of our test contained resolution of greater than -120dB (.0001%) or over 100 times more precision than required, and certainly more resolution than even the best audio systems could provide, yet no presence of wire distortion was found.

Jim Thiel
We need only one layer of insulation which can be of the best type, Teflon, without worry that the thickness of the insulation will be a practical problem. So we can choose the best sounding wire, which is smallish solid wire, without having to accept any compromises caused by (a little) higher resistance.

Audioholics
Again I don't see how you can conclude the "best sounding" wire for a few feet of internal cabling of even the worst (18AWG wire). I assume this is merely a statement of opinion.

Jim Thiel
Well, I have tried to explain why, in our speakers, even ten ohms of internal resistance would not cause any sonic problems other than sensitivity loss, how we wire our speakers to eliminate the possibility of other subtle factors having a negative effect on the sound, and how we can achieve our objectives without spending a lot of money that I feel is better spent on better drivers or cabinet.

Audioholics
Ok so what you are saying is that the consumer can use any type of wire, stranded or solid core, 10AWG or 22AWG and still expect excellent performance with perhaps some loss in sensitivity when higher gauge wires are used. So why are we having such an involved discussion on wires? :-)

Jim Thiel
Well, this had been a very long answer, and probably more than you wanted to know, but I hope it answers your question.

Sincerely,

Jim Thiel