Spending a decent chunk of change on a cable isn’t something every guitarist is willing to do. Let’s face it – your guitar, pickups, amp, effects and fingers should be doing the bulk of your tone-shaping. However, your cable is easily the largest piece of your signal chain – go cheap there and you have no excuse for not being happy with your sound.

So, how do you do yourself a favor and select the right cable that will effectively transfer and perhaps even help color your tone, depending on your needs? If there’s one thing we learned during our recent roundup of high-end cables, it’s that players and cable manufacturers have many goals in mind when it comes to cables – aligning your specific cable needs with a manufacturer’s particular design is what it’s all about.

Having picked the brains of a many a luthier, amp builder and effects guru by now in our Builder Profile series, we thought it was high time we went deep with a cable guy. We had a chance to chat with Steve Seropian, owner of Accusound cables, about the matching process between players and cables and what’s involved with catering to such a nuanced area of tone hunting.

Tell me about your background and what you bring to the table.

In addition to instrument cables, I also manufacture microphone, patch and multi-pair Silver Studio Pro Cables. Basically, I started out back when everybody was cutting tape as a studio engineer. And that was back in the early eighties, when you kind of had to know your way around the studio, so everybody had an electrical or audio background -- at least some general knowledge. As part of your job you had to calibrate tape players, work on equipment -- the boards were constantly breaking down -- you had to know what you were looking at and how to fix things. What we're doing now in the studio now was just a dream back then.

I had a lot of aptitude with electrical gear and most of my clients would bring their gear to me to repair or modify. This was a great opportunity for me to dig in and work on all kinds of equipment, from vintage to current.  It wasn’t long before the repair business fanned out to the local music stores and I kept this going for a while. After tweaking and modifying all this wonderful equipment, it only made sense for me to take the next step. I wanted to get into a market where I could make a difference and I felt that in building and designing cable I could make something that would be viable in the market and make a difference for people.

So when did Accusound get started -- what was your approach to design and manufacturing?

We started about five and a half years ago. I really wanted to put out a cable that would make a difference in one's sound, tone or whatever quest they're on. Something that would be substantial; which is easier said than done, it's a pretty fine line to walk!

The approach we took was to use the best possible materials available and to figure out why some things sound better and others don't. I investigated what makes one cable different than another – considering lifespan, ease of use and all sorts of things. Then I got involved with other people with similar goals, in order to get the product out at a reasonable cost. I wanted to make and assemble everything in America, and that's a very tough thing to do when most cable companies are outsourcing their products. The only foreign part on our cables is the connectors -- Neutrik for a mic or patch cable, Amphenol for an instrument cable -- both of which are outsourced.

What we found is a lot of this is about balance -- that's really where all the magic lies. It's not having too much or too little capacitance. Everybody has a different twist on those things. What we found was in the manufacturing process and materials, and the balance you keep between all of that really makes the difference.

Why is it so important to keep your manufacturing in the States?

The costs in the United States are considerably higher than elsewhere, but we want to make sure our quality control is consistent to produce the best product possible.
 
We use a proprietary winding technique and as a result, Accusound cables boast phase shift and distortion that is unmeasurable between 0 and 200kHz. To obtain this test result we used an AP-Audio Precision.

Let's say you're using half a dozen cables in your rig and each cable is off even a degree. By the time you're down the line you're already out of phase six degrees from where you started. And that may not sound like much, but if you're recording it is.

As I'm sure you're aware, we recently had somewhat of a shootout with a number of your peers and, based on reader feedback, found there are still a lot of players out there who are skeptical about the entire concept of high-end cables. What would you tell a reader who's out there thinking, "Yeah, I get great tone from a pretty cheap cable, I don't know about this."

For those people out there that are happy with what they're doing, I applaud them. If you've got something that's working and you're happy with it, and it's holding up in all the different environments, and it's part of what your tone is, then great.

What I am finding is a lot of people spend a lot of their money on an amplifier, pickups and their guitar, and then they'll go buy a much lesser quality cable they can find to hook everything up. It’s not a mortal sin; however, you do want to have at least some integrity and continuity to what you're doing. You want to have your best possible signal path for what you've just purchased.

The whole reason behind my research was to bring to market a cable that had good value and solid construction with improved sound. We took the opposite approach. As a matter of fact, if another company looked at our advertising they'd say, " How on earth are you even operating?" What we've done is we've put everything back into our company -- back into the cable. We don't spend thousands of dollars on advertising. We are growing our business one customer at a time, through various means of advertising, including word of mouth and sponsorships. Our advertising budget obviously can’t compete with the major corporations. We're a small company in Massachusetts making a quality product and standing behind it all the way.

Well, I think the best approach to take is, when they're ready to take the plunge so to speak, boil the setup down to one or two cables and listen to what you've got with what you've purchased in the past.

Let's just use a guitar and amp for instance here in this particular scenario. We'll take the guitar, the amp and take that one cable that you have and listen to it. Is it transferring your touch, your finger pressure to the board, the tone of your guitar, the wood that the guitar's made of, and the pickups themselves? All those things have characteristics to them, and if someone's getting to the point where they're thinking, "Well, I don't think I'm getting everything I've really wanted to get out of this particular setup," then that's probably their first foray into the next step of the cable world.

That cable holds the truth to everything that's going from that guitar through that amplifier. Like I said, if you can boil it down to just two things, that would be great because then you'll really know without having anything else in the chain. That would be a great way for someone new to high end cables to compare the difference. If you then purchased my cable, and didn't think that the reverb tales were a little longer, the pickups
weren't truer to what you purchased, the guitar woods weren't starting to show through a little bit, or any of those improvements [were apparent] you could return it to the company and go back to where you were. Or you might say, "Wow, this really does make a difference." And then, kind of get your setup going from there.

So how do you approach the cable's role in shaping the sound?

We're trying to make something that's absolutely as neutral as possible. There are a lot of cables out there that are a little brighter, while other cable manufacturers have cables that'll make the sound a little more jazzy. And that's great; if that's the sound you're going after, then that's absolutely what you should do. However, if you want to try to get the truest representation, the truest picture of your microphone, guitar or whatever you're using, that's our approach. We wanted to try to keep that as real and connected as we could, so it didn't seem that there was distance between what was happening at the source and then what was happening at your input.

We don't want to introduce additional phase or distortion from the cable, but most of the time you're going to find a little low-end distortion, some high-end distortion and some phase shift around the upper and lower regions. It's very difficult to get that out of a cable, but these are the things we wanted to address. It kind of goes beyond what you hear.

Some of the things aren't what you hear, it may be what you're not hearing in the lower and upper ranges that make your overall sound better. And if you kind of take that whole approach it's exponential.

Let's dig in a little bit. Your cables are technically hybrids, with silver-plated copper conductors and you've got a silver compound in there too. Talk about those metals – their  frequency response and conductivity. What's going on there?

There's a lot of confusion about this, and this gets back to the marketing of different companies and the reasons why people are so confused. Let's start with the copper -- its the most widely used conductor as far as cables in our world. And a lot of the marketing has been OFC -- Oxygen-Free Copper -- let's start there. The ETP copper is based on weight and purity -- Electronic Tough Pitch -- the ETP copper is extremely high purity metal and that's what we want to use in our products. Usually to get into that ETP category, you need to be 99.3 weight percent, which is your wrought alloys that contain a minimum copper content of that.

99.3 percent of what?

Of a weight percent of copper content. That's mostly where your ETP copper is going to fall, and ours is a little higher so we're even a little purer on the copper. We use a 99.8, so we're almost 100 percent. We just want to make sure we're getting everything we possibly can.

OFC copper’s recommended use is in hydrogen environments because copper is susceptible to embrittlement when alloyed in oxygen, so they created Oxygen Free Copper. I don't know how that infiltrated into our industry; other than there have been claims that OFC copper makes a sonic difference?  Musicians don't tend to expose the copper to hydrogen!

So, what we use is the purest form that we can find of an ETP copper. And I'm going to kind of keep this very general because I don't want to give away the whole trade secret of how we do everything!

We electroplate 99.9 percent silver onto each stand of copper before it’s wound. The reason we use the electroplating process instead of the dipping process is that it keeps the silver even. That means I'm not going to get any bumps from dipping -- you don't know, depending on how it runs, how even that's going to be. So what we've done is we've taken the process of electroplating that silver to each strand of copper. And the reason why we've done this is because we've found, and I think most people would agree, is when a signal runs down a cable line, it does have the tendency to run on the outside of that copper and get absorbed into the insulator. Because the signal is not running down the dead center, it's really not getting down the line perfectly even, and by the time you get to the other end you've absorbed a lot of your signal.

For the insulator, we decided to go with an audiofile-grade resin. Whether we use polypropylene or polyethylene, we want a very good dielectric constant, which is <2.26; the frequency wave –or the velocity of propagation - is the speed in which the wave travels down your cable. And we've achieved a nice wave speed because we've used two things to help this: the insulator and the silver. The insulator actually adds more to this equation than the silver, however the silver does help in maintaining the integrity of the signal, so they both play an important role. If we used all silver it would make the cable out of sight as far as price, and it also does change the timbre of sound of that frequency wave. We tested it with both pure silver and our hybrid.

What exactly are the sonic differences between the materials?

That’s a great question and hard to answer because it’s very subjective. What we've found is that having a combination of both materials has a certain tone, pitch and signal transfer that we've found works really well.

Your cable has one of the best feeling jackets I've felt in a long time.

We've taken a lot of feedback to try to get it right for people  … [it won’t] tangle up but it does still roll enough and stays flat enough on the floor, plus it's sturdy enough where if you step on it or spill things on it, it will hold up. We used nylon for that; a lot of cables use cloth over their PVC -- Polyvinyl chloride -- jacket, and unfortunately cloth jackets attract a lot of dirts and oils, and it also holds in moisture where as nylon won't.

Yeah, like beer.

[We use] a chemical resistant nylon and when it's exposed to things, the nylon acts as a barrier. Sunlight will even break down PVC, and if we're going to give a limited
lifetime warranty I want our cable to hold up for customers
 
Tell me about the solder. You use a silver compound, and there's some confusion out there about a trade-off when it comes to extended life.

Well, there are a couple reasons why we wanted to use a silver compound solder. First, we go from a silver-plated cable to silver solder to silver pins on our mic cables, or to gold pins on our ¼”cables, which are very similar to silver. Second, we don t like to use dissimilar metals. Basically, a lead/tin solder joint is very strong, but if you can take all the similar metals and alloy them together then you've got a stronger connection with less impurities in the line. It really doesn't boil down to a strength issue, I think a lead/tin solder is going to hold up just as well, but it's more of an issue of the purity and keeping it the same for those electrical purposes.  Third, keeping more of the heavy metals out of the solder, is better for the environment. All our cable is RoHS compliant.

We offer an instrument cable, mic cable, patch cable, and a pedal jumper in our Silver Studio Pro line. We've also introduced our Silver- HD 2, which is a stereo cable for stereo microphones -- it's a two pair cable. We also came out with our HD-8 which is an eight pair snake, all with very low capacitance, a hybrid design and a proprietary winding technique. We're excited about the eight pair because it's something that fits into 99 percent of the studios out there, whether they're using a D-Sub connector, an ELCO or a Molex connector. It's a way for somebody to really make a difference in their sound and wire up their studio because its capacitance is very low compared to the competition. As you know, it increases every foot, so if you're running ten feet then it's going to make a difference.

If somebody really gets into your stuff and says, "Hey, I want to outfit my whole rig, I'm looking for someone to do custom stuff." Do you offer those services as well?

Yes we do. We've had a few instances already where we've done full studios and full guitar rigs and we go from stem to stern with it. We'd be more than happy to do that because that's the biggest compliment we can possibly get.

For more information, visit Accusound's website