The Danacable Design

There are many design considerations in building a speaker cable. In the pursuit of a unique brand, cable manufacturers make different technology choices: Some seek exotic material claimed to be more effective in carrying signals. Some choose active solutions to change the characteristics of the signal. Others use material science techniques such as cryogenics to alter the characteristics of the cables. Yet it is important to recognize that cables are inherently passive components. Their main role should be to allow signals to flow more freely, not to add characteristics to the sound (the latter is a job we believe is best left to other active components such as amplifiers). By impeding the free flow of the signal, cables cannot improve the sound, but they can certainly degrade it. A poorly-designed cable can make reproduced music sound veiled and lifeless. The best cable would be no cable at all, but wireless signal transport has its limitations and is currently not suitable for high-quality amplifier-to-speaker signal transport.

A speaker cable has three electrical attributes – resistance (R), inductance (L), and capacitance (C). An ideal speaker cable would have no resistance, no inductance and no capacitance (zero R, L, and C). Not physically possible, but if it were, this cable would “do no harm”. It would simply pass the amplifier voltage/current to the speaker without changing it in any way. All real world speaker cables have some R, L, and C. The value and ratio of these three parameters affect the “sound” of the cable, from “favoring the bass”, to “smoothing the high end”, to “bringing out the midrange”, etc. The goal of the Danacable™ is to “get out of the way” and to cause no audible effects. It allows the amplifier and speakers to do their jobs as intended.

In designing the Danacable™, we choose to get back to basics. While others seek new, but often unproven, materials, we strongly believe that for audio signal transport, copper is a tried-and-true and cost-effective material. Take a look at our Danacable™ test video clip above and you’ll learn why low resistance is so crucial to the amplifier-speaker interface. To reduce R, we find that more truly is better: Our Onyx line has more than 5,000 strands of Oxygen-Free Copper (OFC) in a pair. The Sapphire speaker cables have more than 10,000 strands. Our state of the art Diamond Reference comes in at over 25,000 strands, thus reducing R to vanishingly low levels – only 2.3 milliohms in a 2.5 meter pair (that’s only 0.0023 ohms!). We construct our cables with a patent-pending technique to reduce L and C to a minimum, which ensures that any effect they might have is well outside the audio range. The chart below sums up the specifications for our cables, we believe these to be the best in the industry.

Model Construction (2.5m length) R (ohms) L (uH) C (pF)
Onyx 4-weaved, 8AWG 0.0060 1.6 270
Sapphire 8-weaved, 8AWG 0.0040 1.8 508
Sapphire Reference 8-weaved, 8AWG 0.0038 1.8 485
Diamond 4-weaved, 4AWG 0.0034 1.6 383
Diamond Reference 8-weaved, 8AWG 0.0023 1.3 726

Besides holding the wires together, the weaving makes for a flexible cable that audiophiles find easy to install, compared with large, stiff, and cumbersome cables. Lastly, we use high-quality connectors to terminate the cables to ensure the best possible performance.

Our interconnects and digital cable products incorporate our proprietary “Distributed Damping” technology to reduce the ringing effect, thus result in extremely low noise signal transmission and allow the music to flow effortlessly. Our headphones cables are hand-crafted using the best-quality, individually-sheathed Litz wires for the best separation and clear transmission of low-level signals.

The Danacable™ design is not fancy and exciting but it works and we can prove it. We have conducted many head-to-head comparison tests against other exotic and expensive cables. Our cables just sound better and work well with all audio components regardless of their technologies; they get out of the way and let the rest of the system do what it is designed to do. We believe Danacable is the best disappearing act in audio.