I visited the US patent office to read the patents Cardas has. I am in the second year of the Master's Degree in EE with emphasis on electromagnetics, so I claim to understand the technology. Just a few interesting points:
"The cable strands are commonly twisted about the longitudinal centerline of the cable and encased within an insulating sheath which confines the body of strands radially of the cable. For reasons which are well understood in the electrical art and need not be explained in this disclosure, such multi-strand cables are characterized by enhanced electrical and mechanical properties relative to a single conductor cable. Among the foremost of these enhanced properties are improved fidelity and phase coherence in the case of audio and data signal transmission cables, and reduced electrical power losses and increased cable strength-to-weight ratio in the case of electrical power transmission cables or lines."
Really? The purpose of multistranded cabling is to reduce skin effect. Skin effect DOES NOT happen in audio frequencies. As an example, at 1GHz, the skin depth in copper is 0.000082 inches (
http://signalintegrity.com/pubs/news/skineffect.htm).
"Fluctuations in the current flow through the cable strands produces corresponding fluctuations in the strand charges and thereby in the repulsion forces between adjacent strands. These fluctuations in the repulsion forces interact, in effect, with the resilient resisting forces on the strands in a manner which tends to cause relative back and forth lateral motion, that is, vibration, of the strands. The resulting relative vibratory movements or displacements of the cable strands vary their reactances and thereby introduce additional fluctuations and frequency components into the current flow through the cable."
Wow...really...this happens with power lines. We *might* (and that's a BIG might) be seeing this phenomenon in interconnects with lateral values in the NANOmeters. Ever see your speaker cables vibrate? Didn't think so. Think it does in interconnects? Very unlikely.
"The basic purpose of this invention is to reduce or substantially eliminate resonance in a multi-strand electrical cable having conductive wire strands of differing sizes (i.e.cross-sections)and thereby avoid the above-noted and other adverse consequences of such resonance." Anyone know what the resonance of an audio cable is (3ft-10ft)? Yep, it's in the megaHertz.
"In all of the disclosed embodiments, the cable strands are arranged in such a way that larger strands are located radially outward of smaller strands to stabilize the smaller strands against resonant vibration."
Why do the inner/smaller strands need to be 'stabalized'? The outer ones don't need to be? Do any of them 'really' need to be 'stabalized'? So current only flows through the inner strands? We are talking about micro and milliamps here. NOT 69kV lines as the patent tries to relate to.
My guess would be that the $2400 goes to pay for braiding the strands.
