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| Cable Design: Insulation/ dielectric | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Technology behind Abbey Road Cable | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Cable insulation is often referred to as dielectric. All dielectrics have some degree of electrical absorbency, acting like an electrical 'sponge'.
This effects the speed that signal can pass through a cable. Think about cable as a pipe with sponge inside it and water poured though.
The sponge has to be saturated before the water can pass through. The more sponge there is in the pipe, the more the delay is. The degree that a material slows signal is measured by its dielectric constant. The delay in a cable is measured by its propagation delay. A cable with a high dielectric constant (not so good) is like a pipe filled with sponge. The amount of 'electrical sponge' effect of a material is measured by its 'dielectric constant'. The measure of how much a cable slows a signal is called its 'propagation delay'. The choice of insulation material has a major impact on cable performance. |
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The best dielectric known in the universe is nitrogen. Being a gas, it is impractical to use on its own in a cable. One of the best solid dielectrics we know is polyethylene. Moving Air has brought these two together, foaming polyethylene with nitrogen. The image shows a magnified cross section of the Abbey Road Cable dielectric, clearly showing the nitrogen cells in the foamed polyethylene, making a dielectric with outstanding performance. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This amount of foaming is very hard to manufacture in a stable way, but the resulting performance is outstanding.
(This is illustrated on the results page of
this document.
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