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| Cable Design: Solid core or stranded core? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The technology behind Abbey Road Cable | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In theory the best shape for a conductor is a tube shape. This is because electricity travels easiest at the
surface of a conductor, and a tube has a large surface. This effect is called the 'Skin Effect'
[read more on skin effect]. |
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This picture shows a practical application utilising skin conduction. This 400mm diameter high frequency, high power transmitter
conductor is all surface area!
A large tubular conductor is impractical. Stranding cores offers an alternative practical way to make a conductor with a lots of surface area; The strand surfaces sum up so the more strands there are, and the finer they are, the more surface area the core has. |
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It is important for a hi-fi cable to have many fine strands. With a few thick strands the electrical current is too concentrated which creates strong electro-magnetically induced vibration between strands; this causes distortion. In the past this meant solid conductors were preferred to stranded, however, now is possible to make extremely fine strands, the use of many strands dissipates the electrical field energy so much, it is superior by a long way. Moving Air's Abbey Road Reference speaker cable has 790 hair like strands, with a total surface area the equivalent of a pipe that is 50mm diameter! With virtually no interstrand forces, this gives a dramatic improvement on pretty well all other conductor formats. [To next page] |
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