Time Aligned Interconnect Cables

[Hari Iyer]

I started my serious cable hunt from 2012 when initially thought that wires dont' matter. Now after 10 years of tinkering around, for me wires are the most important component of my setup. I have tried a plethora of permutations and combinations of conductors, dielectrics, geometry, connectors to arrive at my first final IC cable. It took me close to 10 years and almost a quarter of a grand to achieve this.

I am glad to announce that my first IC cables are going to a FM @srijith who stays at Thane. He had visited some around 6 months ago with is AQ green IC cables for a comparison with my then time aligned IC. The DIY cables sounded much better than the AQ in both transparency and details which were quite neutral. He immediately requested me to build one pair for him without any second thought. But i still had not completed my learning and thought they could be bettered. I used this 6 months to try some more materials and after completion of my testing assembled a final IC cable which i though he would like in his setup too.

These are 1/2 Fulton length cables and they use gold plated connectors. They have air and silicon fiber as dielectrics. The conductors are made out of 6 metals in different awg size to arrive at a final awg size of 20awg which imo should be quite reasonable. The measured capacitance of the pair are 19pF and 22pF (yes you are reading them right). I have connected this cable to my setup and am listening past 2 hrs. I am liking what i am listening and this particular cable has less shine compared to my own cable because of the changes in the awg size of the conductors ( i persume). These sound very neutral without any over or under emphasis of any paricular frequency. Srijith will be picking this cable from me tomorrow and he shall break-in them at his setup. May be after 2 weeks we can get an listening impression from him.



Thanks for looking.

 

[MaSh]

Congratulations. That must be a great feeling. Any plans of going commercial with this?

MaSh

 

[Hari Iyer]

Congratulations. That must be a great feeling. Any plans of going commercial with this?

MaSh

No as of now. Imo, industry over here is not yet mature for such stuff.

 

[sachinchavan 15865]

I’ve been witness to your experimentation with various materials to come up with a good sounding, low capacitance IC. Congratulations @Hari Iyer in reaching an important milestone in your long, diligent project!

 

[alpha1]

What does "Time aligned" mean?

 

[RajithKumar]

I started my serious cable hunt from 2012 when initially thought that wires dont' matter. Now after 10 years of tinkering around, for me wires are the most important component of my setup. I have tried a plethora of permutations and combinations of conductors, dielectrics, geometry, connectors to arrive at my first final IC cable. It took me close to 10 years and almost a quarter of a grand to achieve this.

I am glad to announce that my first IC cables are going to a FM @srijith who stays at Thane. He had visited some around 6 months ago with is AQ green IC cables for a comparison with my then time aligned IC. The DIY cables sounded much better than the AQ in both transparency and details which were quite neutral. He immediately requested me to build one pair for him without any second thought. But i still had not completed my learning and thought they could be bettered. I used this 6 months to try some more materials and after completion of my testing assembled a final IC cable which i though he would like in his setup too.

These are 1/2 Fulton length cables and they use gold plated connectors. They have air and silicon fiber as dielectrics. The conductors are made out of 6 metals in different awg size to arrive at a final awg size of 20awg which imo should be quite reasonable. The measured capacitance of the pair are 19pF and 22pF (yes you are reading them right). I have connected this cable to my setup and am listening past 2 hrs. I am liking what i am listening and this particular cable has less shine compared to my own cable because of the changes in the awg size of the conductors ( i persume). These sound very neutral without any over or under emphasis of any paricular frequency. Srijith will be picking this cable from me tomorrow and he shall break-in them at his setup. May be after 2 weeks we can get an listening impression from him.

View attachment 72990

Thanks for looking.

Great Effort Sir Congratulations

 

[Hari Iyer]

What does "Time aligned" mean?

When music pass through the conductors, depending upon the conductor used the HF will be ahead by a few msec in time compared to MF and LF. This will cause time smear of your signal causing your speakers to be more bright and sibilant to listen. The time aligned interconnect uses 6 different metals which have different awg size based on their resistivity and conductivity twisted to form a single conductor. This conductor is then sleeved in a silicone fibre glass insulator to build the interconnect cable as per the image. This type of geometry is known to have less time smear preventing sibilant sounding setups.

 

[panditji]

Won't the "time aligned" cables be better used as speaker cables which actually transmit the final music in different frequencies? Won't the ICs simply transfer/transport digital signal as a whole?

 

[prem]

When music pass through the conductors, depending upon the conductor used the HF will be ahead by a few msec in time compared to MF and LF. This will cause time smear of your signal causing your speakers to be more bright and sibilant to listen. The time aligned interconnect uses 6 different metals which have different awg size based on their resistivity and conductivity twisted to form a single conductor. This conductor is then sleeved in a silicone fibre glass insulator to build the interconnect cable as per the image. This type of geometry is known to have less time smear preventing sibilant sounding setups.

This doesn’t make sense. In recording studio and auditoriums, normal stranded copper cables are used. There is never any time smear.

In audio, I never understand why we are trying to create solutions even when there is no problem

 

[aeroash]

When music pass through the conductors, depending upon the conductor used the HF will be ahead by a few msec in time compared to MF and LF. This will cause time smear of your signal causing your speakers to be more bright and sibilant to listen. The time aligned interconnect uses 6 different metals which have different awg size based on their resistivity and conductivity twisted to form a single conductor. This conductor is then sleeved in a silicone fibre glass insulator to build the interconnect cable as per the image. This type of geometry is known to have less time smear preventing sibilant sounding setups.

Has this “Time smear” been measured, or is this subjective?

 

[Dr.Gary]

When music pass through the conductors, depending upon the conductor used the HF will be ahead by a few msec in time compared to MF and LF. This will cause time smear of your signal causing your speakers to be more bright and sibilant to listen. The time aligned interconnect uses 6 different metals which have different awg size based on their resistivity and conductivity twisted to form a single conductor. This conductor is then sleeved in a silicone fibre glass insulator to build the interconnect cable as per the image. This type of geometry is known to have less time smear preventing sibilant sounding setups.

Please provide a calculation which illustrates the difference in wave propagation of "a few msec" between LF, MF a HF signals a three-foot long coaxial or twisted pair interconnect cable.

 

[RtoR King]

Please provide a calculation which illustrates the difference in wave propagation of "a few msec" between LF, MF a HF signals a three-foot long coaxial or twisted pair interconnect cable.

A lot of non-technical audiophiles confuse acoustic (sound) delay with electrical signal delay. Case in point, time aligned speakers where the midrange and tweeters are physically stepped back from the woofer. This is legit science being applied.

As we know the speed of sound is 750mph.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles a second.
And for other reasons of physics, electrical energy travels from 66% -78% the speed of light through cables.

So yes, the idea of an audible delay difference heard through typical length audio cables is implausible.

A good example is satellite transmission. Geo synchronous satellites are 22,000 miles out. A round trip of a signal, 44,000 miles, is only 600 milliseconds.
* The math here gets a little tricky because propagation in space (a vacuum) is the speed of light where as through our atmosphere is slower by a very small percentage

 

[Dr.Gary]

A lot of non-technical audiophiles confuse acoustic (sound) delay with electrical signal delay. Case in point, time aligned speakers where the midrange and tweeters are physically stepped back from the woofer. This is legit science being applied.

As we know the speed of sound is 750mph.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles a second.
And for other reasons of physics, electrical energy travels from 66% -78% the speed of light through cables.

So yes, the idea of an audible delay difference heard through typical length audio cables is implausible.

A good example is satellite transmission. Geo synchronous satellites are 22,000 miles out. A round trip of a signal, 44,000 miles, is only 600 milliseconds.
* The math here gets a little tricky because propagation in space (a vacuum) is the speed of light where as through our atmosphere is slower by a very small percentage

I find it difficult to believe that the OP is unaware of and unable to appreciate the gross difference between the speed of sound in air and speed of electromagnetic wave propagation in a cable. On the other hand, in the world of audio, I guess that anything is possible.

 

[surfatwork]

When music pass through the conductors, depending upon the conductor used the HF will be ahead by a few msec in time compared to MF and LF. This will cause time smear of your signal causing your speakers to be more bright and sibilant to listen. The time aligned interconnect uses 6 different metals which have different awg size based on their resistivity and conductivity twisted to form a single conductor. This conductor is then sleeved in a silicone fibre glass insulator to build the interconnect cable as per the image. This type of geometry is known to have less time smear preventing sibilant sounding setups.

This is simply incorrect. It's not like the HF is on a virar fast and the LF/MF are on an Andheri slow.

 

[mbhangui]

This doesn’t make sense. In recording studio and auditoriums, normal stranded copper cables are used. There is never any time smear.

In audio, I never understand why we are trying to create solutions even when there is no problem

It doesn't make sense because we are talking about electro magnetic waves travelling at a constant speed of 3×10^8 m/s (in vacum speed). Electricity is also form of electromagnetic wave and depending on the material it's speed will be some percentage of the above speed. But it will be a constant, be it silver, copper or gold, the speed will not change. The energy loss however will vary and so the amplitude of HF, MF, LF will attenuate depending on the material. But we are not talking about that. We are also not talking about the HF, MF driver distance from the listening position which actually does create time smear (only because of driver to ear distance). So if one achieves to slow down the speed of HF, MF and LF differentially with just few inches of cable that would be really something which will make Einstein very unhappy.

Sound travels at 343 m / s in dry air at 20 °C (depending on density of air). In air too the speed of sound is independent of frequency. One of the more important properties of sound is that its speed is nearly independent of frequency. This independence is certainly true in open air for sounds in the audible range of 20 to 20,000 Hz. If this independence were not true, you would certainly notice it for music played by a marching band in a stadium, for example. Suppose that high-frequency sounds traveled faster—then the farther you were from the band, the more the sound from the low-pitch instruments would lag that from the high-pitch ones. But the music from all instruments arrives in cadence independent of distance, and so all frequencies must travel at nearly the same speed. Recall that in one cycle a wave travels it's wavelength 𝜆. So if frequency of any wave is 𝑓, it's speed will be 𝑓 multipled by 𝜆.

𝑣𝑤=𝑓𝜆

In a given medium under fixed conditions, 𝑣𝑤 (velocity) is constant, so that there is a relationship between 𝑓 (frequency) and 𝜆 (wavelength); the higher the frequency, the smaller the wavelength.

So let's take an example of the 50Hz wave. The wavelength would be 300000000/50 = 6000000 m = 6000 Km.

So in just 1 second the 50 Hz wave will travel 6000 Km multipled by 50. For such a wave what is few feets of copper wire? Similarly
In just 1 second a 5000 Hz wave will travel 60 Km multiplied by 5000. Regardless of the frequency the speed is constant. The constant speed of light become one of the two main planks of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. So if someone manages to change the speed of electricity using some cables, then it would make Einstein very unhappy.

If LF, MF, HF travel at different speed, that would create a havoc. Listening to any singer in a stadium would have the drums beats reaching last, singer's voice reaching in between and the sound of guitar, violin reaching first. So someone in the last row would assume the singer is singing totally out of tune.

If the OP is getting good results, it will be purely due to very good quaility cable that he has made, because of low capacitance but not due to time altering property of the cable. The OP can further reduce the capacitance by around 4-10 pF by replacing the RCA plugs with bullet connector.

EDIT: Just realized we dealt with this earlier

Speaker cables - Hari Iyer's Cable Experiment

I am 100% sure no FM would I tried this combination. FMs who follow me would know that my speaker wires are 12+12+14 awg each polarity mil spec silver plated Fulton length wires. But unfortunately, the Fulton lengths are not enough for my kind of wierd speaker placement. As I intended to keep...

www.hifivision.com

 

[aeroash]

It doesn't make sense because we are talking about electro magnetic waves travelling at a constant speed of 3×10^8 m/s (in vacum speed). Electricity is also form of electromagnetic wave and depending on the material it's speed will be some percentage of the above speed. But it will be a constant, be it silver, copper or gold, the speed will not change. The energy loss however will vary and so the amplitude of HF, MF, LF will attenuate depending on the material. But we are not talking about that. We are also not talking about the HF, MF driver distance from the listening position which actually does create time smear (only because of driver to ear distance). So if one achieves to slow down the speed of HF, MF and LF differentially with just few inches of cable that would be really something which will make Einstein very unhappy.

Sound travels at 343 m / s in dry air at 20 °C (depending on density of air). In air too the speed of sound is independent of frequency. One of the more important properties of sound is that its speed is nearly independent of frequency. This independence is certainly true in open air for sounds in the audible range of 20 to 20,000 Hz. If this independence were not true, you would certainly notice it for music played by a marching band in a stadium, for example. Suppose that high-frequency sounds traveled faster—then the farther you were from the band, the more the sound from the low-pitch instruments would lag that from the high-pitch ones. But the music from all instruments arrives in cadence independent of distance, and so all frequencies must travel at nearly the same speed. Recall that in one cycle a wave travels it's wavelength 𝜆. So if frequency of any wave is 𝑓, it's speed will be 𝑓 multipled by 𝜆.

𝑣𝑤=𝑓𝜆

In a given medium under fixed conditions, 𝑣𝑤 (velocity) is constant, so that there is a relationship between 𝑓 (frequency) and 𝜆 (wavelength); the higher the frequency, the smaller the wavelength.

So let's take an example of the 50Hz wave. The wavelength would be 300000000/50 = 6000000 m = 6000 Km.

So in just 1 second the 50 Hz wave will travel 6000 Km multipled by 50. For such a wave what is few feets of copper wire? Similarly
In just 1 second a 5000 Hz wave will travel 60 Km multiplied by 5000. Regardless of the frequency the speed is constant. The constant speed of light become one of the two main planks of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. So if someone manages to change the speed of electricity using some cables, then it would make Einstein very unhappy.

If LF, MF, HF travel at different speed, that would create a havoc. Listening to any singer in a stadium would have the drums beats reaching last, singer's voice reaching in between and the sound of guitar, violin reaching first. So someone in the last row would assume the singer is singing totally out of tune.

If the OP is getting good results, it will be purely due to very good quaility cable that he has made, because of low capacitance but not due to time altering property of the cable. The OP can further reduce the capacitance by around 4-10 pF by replacing the RCA plugs with bullet connector.

To summarize, the air from the ceiling fan is not responsible for dispursing the high frequencies!

 

[mbhangui]

To summarize, the air from the ceiling fan is not responsible for dispursing the high frequencies!

True. Sound travels as wave and cannot be dispersed by the ceiling fan. Which reminds me of something. Electricity and light do not travel like particles. In the good old days, people assumed that light travelled as particles through a medium known as ether. People assume that high frequency, because it vibrates faster, will travel faster. What they don't take into account is that higher the frequency shorter the wavelength. This is like people think that if you drop two balls from a tall building, the bigger ball will reach the ground first. In reality both will reach the ground at the same time and this is what Galileo showed by dropping two balls from the leaning tower of Pisa.

In 1868, the equations of the Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell, building on the earlier work of Ampère, Coulomb and Faraday, noted that all electromagnetic waves traveled at exactly the same speed as light in empty space, and that light itself was a kind of wave rippling through the invisible magnetic and electric fields. Maxwell concluded that light and other electromagnetic waves should travel at a certain fixed speed relative to some unconfirmed ambient medium he called “aether”.

The famous Michelson-Morley experiments of 1887, in a failed attempt to prove that light travels through a medium known as aether, had unexpectedly demonstrated that light travels at the same speed regardless of whether it was measured in the direction of the Earth’s motion or at right angles to it. At least this is the case when light travels through a vacuum: when light moves from medium to medium (like from air to glass, for example), its speed can of course change depending on the new medium's index of refraction, and this “bending” of light is essentially how lenses work, as had long been understood.

Thus, whether a source of light is moving towards you or away from you, the light still travels at a steady 300,000 km/s, completely contrary to classical physics and common sense. It was the young Einstein's genius to explain just WHY the speed of light is constant and does not depend on the speed of its source or its observer. In 1905, Einstein (and also the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, who was coming to similar conclusions at around the same time, although from a more mathematical point of view) realized that the whole idea of aether as a medium for light to travel in was totally unnecessary, providing, as we will see, that one was willing to abandon the idea of absolute time.

 

[keith_correa]

It took me close to 10 years and almost a quarter of a grand to achieve this.

A quarter of a grand in India is Rs. 250; that's very inexpensive. Congratulations on achieving what you claim for so less outlay.

 

[alpha1]

When music pass through the conductors, depending upon the conductor used the HF will be ahead by a few msec in time compared to MF and LF. This will cause time smear of your signal causing your speakers to be more bright and sibilant to listen. The time aligned interconnect uses 6 different metals which have different awg size based on their resistivity and conductivity twisted to form a single conductor. This conductor is then sleeved in a silicone fibre glass insulator to build the interconnect cable as per the image. This type of geometry is known to have less time smear preventing sibilant sounding setups.

Do you mean something like refractive index of light?
Refractive index changes slightly with the light wavelength/frequency (= different speed of light for different colors) that's why we have a separation of colors in a prism.

So if I get this right, all electromagentic waves gets slowed down to different extent in any conducting media. The higher the frequency, the slower the speed of EM waves - and that is what causes maximum bending of violet/blue light compared to red.

The same phenomenon is in work for EM spectrum carrying audio signals. The HF will be slower than LF and thus may cause a difference in the signal reaching the driver and thus causing a time mismatch in the intended signal reaching our ears. (How much difference? Few nanoseconds for cable length of few meters)

But then this implies that while listening, our ears have to be equidistant from each driver to the tolerance of perhaps less than micron in order for us to detect any change caused solely by the medium (interconnects, speaker cable etc.)
? Looks to be impractical for even a machine, let alone a human being.

 

[jls001]

Are we conflating two different things, namely, propagation of EM waves in free space/atmosphere, and over a transmission line? For the latter, the speed of propagation is inversely proportional to the root of the product of the characteristic capacitance and the characteristic inductance of the transmission line. It is not frequency dependent.