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Please don't confuse the issue. (long)

Hi.

I tried to explain technically how come ICs may sound different when hooked up with their MARKED direction reversed. All these directional cables are twisted pair for balanced signal return with an overall shielding sleeving grounded at the receiving end of the cable.

Now you raised another issue of unbalanced ICs whereby the shielding sleeve also acts as the return signal path as for most of those skinny crappy so called ICs come free from your CD or DVD players. In this unbalanced signal return situation, it got to be grounded both end to complete the return circuit.

Shielding is NOT a sonic blessing for audio. I would refrain from using any shielding as much as possible due to the wire-to-shield capacitance of EACH conductor inside the shield sleeving.

A tightly twisted pair of conductors of IDENTICAL specs can provide self noise cancelling effect. The EMI/RFI picked up in one twist can be cancelled out by the noise picked up by the next twist down the line. Good for up to 1MHz. So for audio use, it is OK even shielding is not there.

A designer-builder-owner of a brandname power amp well known of its sonic quality publicly disnounces the use of any shielding for audio wires & cables. He claims shielding can only kill the livelness of music.

Indeed, overall shielding will add more capacitance to the inter-conductor capacitance of the twisted pair of wires forming the IC & is proportional to the dielectric constant of the insulation dielectric & inversely proportional to the log10 of D/d. D=overall diameter of the shielding & d=diameter of the wire itself.

Generally, shielding capacitance is a few time more than inter-conductor capacitance of a twisted pair.

In fact, all audio ICs I DIY built for own use & for whoever affordable, are tightly twisted pair WIHTOUT any overall shielding. The conductors are either 4N silver & Ag plated OFHC pure copper if budget is limited. This includes ICs btween turntable to phonostage, which works fine with mine for SHORT lengths.

I would touch coaxial cable separately if my readers are interested.

c-J


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