Recently I read an e-mail from an old friend, who said that one web expert asserted that speaker cables made with low-soakage materials will sound better than cables made with high-soakage insulation. He claimed that since Pease explained how soakage works, the better cables must sound better. My friend asked me if there would be any audible difference.
I thought about it, and I reached into my wallet. I've been carrying around a photocopy of some facts about different types of speaker cables for many months. I don't think I carried them the 200 mi. around Annapurna, but other than that, I've been carrying them for over a year.
Let's assume we are talking about 10 yd. of cable; anything less than that would be sub-negligible. Some of the simple, low-capacitance ones have 10 to 30 pF/ft. Some of the good, low-impedance ones, which I like (made of 32 pairs of wires), have as much as 300 to 700 pF/ft., or 9000 pF to 21,000 pF/30 ft. Let's talk about those.
If you used a 30-ft. length of cable as the storage capacitor in a sample-and-hold circuit, a teflon cable would look pretty good. And the cheap rubber or plastic-insulated cable might make a rather poor sample-and-hold. A 20,000-pF capacitor made of teflon-insulated wire might have, at 1 or 2 kHz, as much as 20 pF in series with 8 M.
A cable made with poor plastic might have 50 times worse than this, such as 1000 pF in series with 160 k. Mind you, I have not yet measured lamp cord, as a hold-capacitor in a sample-and-hold, but still, this is a ball-park worst-case kind of soakage. Let's see where this leads us.
If you measure the loss factor and settling tails of a sample-and-hold circuit, due to the resistance, the poor cable might look a LOT different. Now, take this poor, lossy cable out of the sample-and-hold, and connect it to an 8- load. Then, drive it from an audio amplifier with 1 of output impedance. If you put 160 k across 8 , it would definitely make a tiny, but measurable difference in impedanceperhaps 0.005%, or 0.0005 dB. It would be different from a teflon cable, all other things being equal. But not a heck of a lot. And, if you consider that the low-impedance amplifier (1 ) is driving this 160 k in parallel with the 8 , that would sound like a 0.00005-dB warpage of the frequency response. I would not call that audible.