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Coax versus twisted pair.

Posted by Jon Risch (B) on April 21, 2015 at 20:47:30

In Reply to: RE: Does this make sense to you ? posted by beppe61 on April 20, 2015 at 22:55:29:

RE twisted pairs vs coaxial cables carrying audio signals.

You need to realize that the so called ground leg carries the signal every bit as much as the so-called "hot" wire does.
See:
About cable "ground":
http://www.AudioAsylum.com/audio/cables/messages/503.html

With that in mind, the real world coaxial cable often has a foil layer, or tinned conductors, or silver plated conductors, or some other less than ideal conductor situation.
The outer layer of a coax (the "shield") often uses a completely different gauge wire than the center wire, woven at a significant angle, with wires criss-crosssing each other to form the tubular coax outer layer.
This leads to an imbalanced amount AND length of conductive material, as well as an imbalance in the voltage field gradient at the surface of the conductor compared to the center wire.
The magnetic field density is also different than the conditions present at the center wire, thus, the magnetic field lines are not balanced either.

Thus the audio signal has to traverse two different kinds of paths to make the round trip that is necessary for actual signal transfer from the source to the load.

With a twisted pair, the audio signal has the same type of wire to traverse, the same electrical and magnetic field conditions for both signal paths, and the close proximity and twisting help provide some small degree of outside interference rejection even though the cable may be an "unbalanced" electrical situation (as opposed to a true balanced condition).

Finally, with a separate shield structure present to help ward off outside
interference, the audio signal "ground" leg does not have to also carry away the interference signal as well as to pass the audio signal. Note that when a shield is forced to carry current, it's shielding effectiveness is reduced and compromised. By the same way, draining the outside interference into the audio signal ground by directly mixing the two in the same conductor is NOT a good thing.
The separate shield of a twisted pair prevents this from occurring, and thus avoids the contamination of the audio signal with outside interference as much.

These are admittedly small issues, and usually have a minute influence on the total resulting sonic performance. However, they ARE positives compared to the coax situation, and all these things add up.
Of all of them, the slight added amount of outside interference rejection may be the most important, as it is hard to overstate the deleterious effects of such contamination of the audio signal on a high performance audio playback system.



Jon Risch

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