special industrial cables for audio

[Jonte Knif]

One day a started to wonder if there are good quality signal cables in some industrial use, which might have some "audiophile appeal" in them. And of course there is.

Swedish Habia Cable manufactures all kinds of special stuff, for military, aviation, even nuclear plants. Some of their products are available in small quantities too, from Elfa. Anyhow, the one I found interesting is simple signal cable, available with different amount of conductors.

http://www.habia.com/published/2/resources/documents/Data_Sheets/Estk.pdf

Because they are made for quite harsh environments and high temperatures they use teflon dielectric (and jacket.) Good for signal transfer too. The geometry is pretty tight, I would prefer thicker insulation for less capacitance, but it is not bad, 78pF per meter for two conductor cable, about the same as Mogami wire of the same diameter, which can not be compared to it in other parameters.
Inductance on the other hand is ridiculously low (not that it matters in line cabling) and dissipation factor very low too. Because of the very tight structure it should attenuate magnetic fields pretty well.
Mechanically the stuff is great. Unbelievable strong. If used in internal wiring it can be bent into nice (but not super tight) corners which keep their form.
The surface is bright white, kind of exotic if you like.
Of course it is expensive, but I haven't seen anything like it. From this moment on it might be my choice for internal wiring.

Now, I would like to know if you guys have found something similar? Of course available in small quantities from stock.

Best, Jonte

 

[JohnRoberts]

In theory they should be better, in practice perhaps in some obscure high impedance path inside a microphone, but otherwise I wouldn't expect even a subtle difference.

I recall working with teflon insulation in my first technician job back in the late 60's. We used some special hot wire strippers to strip off the teflon insulation. This was in a mil-spec (Navy) project and I suspect the teflon was overdesign to tolerate extreme temperatures.

JR

 

[rotation]

One day a started to wonder if there are good quality signal cables in some industrial use, which might have some "audiophile appeal" in them. And of course there is.

Many audiophiles use UTP cables and some FTP. UTP is made of pairs of twisted and unshielded cable pairs. Pairs in FTP are twisted and shielded. Shield is normally made of foil which is connected to drain wire which can be used for grounding. See wiki article about this type of cables, there are many many variations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_pair

I got lots of this cable when i was working for a company that is making video/internet/audio installation. This cables are easy to use because they are quite thin. The only problem i see with some of them is that they normally have more than one twisted pair, and not all of them are shielded. I guess you really have to know what you are doing when you use them for audio. Ohh, and some have solid wires instead of stranded. Don't use solid, then break very easily and you don't even notice it!

Miha