Balanced Audio Cable

Been having a play with some monstrous balanced audio cable. Absolutely ridiculous cost to us.

What it does have is polypropylene insulation to the twisted pair which makes it dead fast!

John C was cursing me yesterday because its nearly 9mm diameter and I asked him to fit the XLRs and TRS jacks the listening test gear requires... he had to resort to butchery to get them to fit.

Usually twisted pair balanced audio cable has a capacitance of over 150pf/m but this stuff is less than half at around 70pf/m (cable manufacturer claimed).

I'm trying out some balanced audio transformers right now and they needed the construction of a new circuit to drive them, so that's still burning in. Also, on the test gear is a new source - the last prototype PCB for the Bitzie USB-DAC, so apart from the Proprius, everything is new and in need of burn-in...

Therefore it's difficult to give a true impression in how this cable sounds right now, but I can tell you it's sounding promising, and the polypropylene is living up to its reputation... it is fast and letting me hear a few background lyrics I'd not heard before. It's good at all frequencies and very musical - better than all the other balanced cable I've heard.

The only problem is it's going to give poor old John some real headaches in being able to terminate it.

Dave Friday wrote: hi Graham,good work,i'm a bit puzzled why your using ballanced cables for quite a short cable run.

So am I, but some people want it that way, and spend lots of money in the process, and I think some of it should come here to support our good work.

We made a prototype which sounds very good but the cable is extremely stiff and heavy.

Over the next few days we'll be experimenting with something a bit more user friendly.

I'll update this topic with my results.

I'm not sure if I should ask this here, or in another topic.
But reading from the comments above, is it really only practical to ballanced cables over a certain distance?