What does that actually mean, an unaltered, untainted, pure signal?
An audio signal is also only an electrical signal, i.e. changing voltage levels of current. Current flows through electrical conductors, e.g. a cable. The higher the resistance (ohm) of a cable, the more energy is lost on the way – it’s eaten up by the cable (see heating last week). The resistance is determined by the length of the cable, the specific electrical resistivity of the utilized material and the cross-section of the conductor (specific resistivity by length of the cable by size of the cross-sectional area).
Some therefore swear by silver cables or silver-plated copper cables. Silver has a 10% better specific resistance - but costs about 54 times as much as copper and is difficult to process into thin strands. If you simply decide to design a cable with a larger cross-sectional area, you’ll get better results at more affordable prices.
A copper cable of 10m length and a 0.2mm² cross-sectional area, for example, has a resistance of 1.8 ohms. In contrast, a copper cable with a whopping 0.5mm² cross-section has a resistance of only 0.7 ohms.
Anyway. An American slogan cuts right to the chase of the matter: "Shit in, shit out". A cable can't improve a bad output signal but a good output signal (e.g. originating from a high quality studio microphone) could lose some of its highs and dynamics due to the use of a cable with high resistance values.
If you want to be on the safe side, especially in the studio, you should work with copper cables with large cross-sectional areas and keep the cable as short as possible. The lower the resistance, the more genuine, pure and unadulterated the signal.
Hence, CORDIAL has developed the CSM FM GOLD 250 with a 0.5mm² conductor cross-section specifically for the work with studio mics
