Twists and turns
Siltech cables combine sets of twisted conductors with comprehensive shielding, to ensure excellent electrical and mechanical characteristics. This in turn delivers consistently high performance in a wide variety of hi-fi systems. Our cable design team has concentrated on optimising the diameter of individual conductors together with the rate of twist, to achieve the finest possible sound.
Size matters
The specific diameter of each conductor has a significant impact on the technical and musical performance of a cable, with direct implications for both resistance and impedance. With advanced silver conductors such as ours, even a small increase in diameter has a significant effect on the amount and cost of the material used.
In any cable design, balancing performance parameters and cost is a key part of the process, but as a rule we use conductors with the largest cross-sectional area possible. This is one of the primary contributors to our cables’ large overall diameter.
Another aspect of cable topology that’s often overlooked, is not just the spacing or lateral disposition of the conductors, but their longitudinal relationship too. The precise spacing and conductor arrangement is critical to the electrical parameters of any cable. The accuracy and consistency of that geometry along the entire length of the cable is also paramount.
That makes both the consistency of the twist-rate and the consistency with which the conductors maintain their spacing within the cable, critical aspects of both design and manufacturing. This is especially so when many of our highest performance cables are manufactured by hand from individual conductors. It underlines the crucial part played by extensive research, specialised machinery and experienced operators in achieving outstanding levels of performance.
Air Cradle Construction
Our engineers take great care in choosing the perfect materials for the insulation of our cables, minimising the disturbance to the sound that some dielectric materials may give. However, no matter what material is used, the more of it that comes into contact with the signal conductor’s surface, the greater effect it has on the cable’s sound.
So-called ‘light touch’ topologies that only contact the conductor at a limited number of discrete points are one solution, but suffer from topological inconsistency. Too loose a contact and the conductor can shift within its insulating tube, especially when the cable is bent. This alters the distance between, and cross-sectional geometry of, the conductors and the signals they carry.
Siltech cables combine the benefits of low contact insulation while maintaining absolute geometrical consistency. For our flagship Triple Crown series, the physical characteristics of Kapton made it inappropriate, so we developed Air Cradle Construction technology.
This complex PTFE matrix is longitudinally flexible but laterally rigid, allowing us to combine large diameter silver conductors with minimal contact insulation while still maintaining accurate geometrical separation. Careful tuning of the relationship between the circumferential matrix and the conductor lets us optimise mechanical damping, while dielectric absorption is the lowest we have ever achieved.