2. cables
  3. 128818-76925

Separate conductors for separate frequency ranges in cables

On this issue, I'm both skeptical and open minded. I'm approaching this in a good faith manner. I saw an ad on Agon for PS Audio power cables and the description reads, "Inside the AC12 are three hollow PCOCC conductors for the treble regions, one massive PCOCC rectangular conductor for the midrange and multiple gauges of PCOCC bundled together for the bass." I read that and just thought to myself, what does PS Audio mean? There is no crossover within the cable that literally separates frequencies and delivers them to separate inputs of a component. I can understand how different types of conductor materials/geometries can optimize different frequencies, but I don’t see how this would work in a single cable. Not too dissimilar are “Shotgun biwire” or “single biwire” speaker cables, but at least in that application you end up with two separate connections at the speaker – one to the bass woofer, and the other to tweeter and midwoofer. Is there anyone out there that can more fully explain what PS Audio is trying to accomplish with this cable construction? Honestly, I’m just seeking to understand, not cast aspersions. I really dig a lot of what PSA does.


128x128blang11

Showing 2 responses by mitch2

mitch2
3,696 posts
 
Electrical current flows through your speaker wires.  More current flows thorough wires with less resistance (i.e., wires with larger cross-sectional area....or smaller gauge).  Therefore, the larger wires will carry a proportionally larger amount of current.  However, in the absence of a cross-over, and ignoring any hysteria about skin-effect, I cannot think of any reason why the different wires in the cable you describe would be carrying different frequencies if they are all connected at the same place at both ends.  The frequencies certainly would not be isolated to different wires as is somewhat implied by the marketing blurb.

As to your question about
"what PS Audio is trying to accomplish with this cable construction"
my thought would be that they decided to try something they could advertise as being somewhat revolutionary and cutting-edge in order to create interest and sell more cables.
mitch2
3,696 posts
 
Yeah, I definitely missed the power cable reference and mistakenly assumed they were speaker cables. However, that they are power cables really doesn't change anything.  Particularly the part about what PS Audio is trying to accomplish, i.e., generate interest to sell more cables.  BTW, Pangea uses different gauges of wire in their PCs, also a mix of stranded and solid core wire, as well as different qualities of wire (i.e., OFC and OCC), but not square wire.
More to discover