Custom Cans Audiophile HD25-1 cable
We have been making the audiophile cable for quite a long time now. They were originally developed with a lot of trial and error and many hours of listening and have got a lot of good feedback about them.
I have finally got some new toys so I can publish some more figures on it’s performance. First of all I will just quickly go through how they are made and why they are constructed the way they are.
The wire we use is made up of 19 x 0.15mm strands of silver plated OFC copper coated in teflon. Using stranded cable keeps them flexible and as they are individually silver plated there is a higher silver content without paying the premium for solid silver. As silver has a lower resistance than copper so most of the signal is carried over the silver plus due to the shin effect the cable offers lower resistance to the very high frequencies where the HD25 start to roll off. The teflon or PTFE is size for size probably the best dielectric to use on thin audio cables as it’s properties stay constant over the audible spectrum it is also quite strong.
We than take 4 strands of that cable and hand braid it and twist it which help it screen out RRI and EMI as well as lowering it’s capacitance, inductance and crosstalk. Well that was the theory… But now we have some figures to show all our efforts worked 😉
The tests below are comparing the audiophile cable with the standard 1.5m sennheiser cable. I know not everyone is a cable believer and the only thing that really matters is how it sounds but is it nice to have a few figures to back it up.
First off the inductance which probably has the least effect on SQ on such a short cable. Inductance is measured in henries which has to be the best name for a measurement I’v herd in a while
As you can see from the pic the sennheiser cable has a measurement of 5.427 microhenries and ours measures just 0.95 microhenries and with all the measurements we are doing lower is better
Next and slightly more important is the capacitance of the cable. Capacitance it the tendency if the cable to store up a charge and can effect timing and impact of the signal and cause something called audio smearing and compresses dynamic range slightly.
Here you can see the standard cable measures 245.3 picoFarads and ours has considerably less at 79.67 picoFarads which again is a nice improvement and mainly due to the braiding
Finally due to the silver plated OFC the cable has a lot less resistance than the standard steel cable. This has several advantages – the first being that less of the signal goes into heating up the cable and more gets to the headphones. This also makes them easier to drive from protable devices which again will help with sound quality and you will get a higher SPL at the same volume setting
As you can see from this pic the standard steel cable has a resistance of 5.5 ohms and our cable is just 0.6 ohms – nearly ten times less
All this combined with high quality connectors gives more detail across the board and a bit of sparkle at the top end