Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade
-Keats, from Lamia
Sound, as we know it, is
subjective experience. It comes at us
through the space around us and we feel its force even as all manner of other
spectral phenomena pass through us without being felt. This subjective experience is, to us,
everything — it is everything that music ever is or could be.
But audio reproduction, regardless of how we experience it, is a
heavily-engineered phenomenon. That this
is so leads to a kind of split-mindedness in audio discussion. So often we see the subjective discussed only
in terms of the subjective, and the objectively measurable discussed only in
terms of objective measurement. That
electrical engineers have not, as a class, been receptive to some phenomena as
reported by users has led, for some in the audiophile world, to a kind of
obsession with subjectivity itself — as though all of those lovely sound waves
could be delivered to us without the “cold philosophy” of electrical
engineering that makes audio reproduction possible.
This needn’t be so. The problems of any aspect of audio
engineering must be solved in order to render audio in the first place, so we
cannot complain, like Keats, that the knowledge of how it is done will unweave
the rainbow. Indeed, sound reproduction
is a bit like unweaving and then reweaving that rainbow, and there’s no getting
around the objective issues involved in optimizing that subjective
experience.
A great deal of audiophile wire and cable design has been done by enthusiasts
of one sort or another, listening to various designs and trying to figure out
what they can. Iconoclast Cable is
fundamentally different: Galen Gareis, our cable designer, was a distinguished
wire and cable engineer with Belden long before Iconoclast was even a notion,
with decades of experience developing cables for a wide variety of
applications. When he embarked on the
process of designing the Iconoclast speaker and interconnect cables, he had the
use of the Belden Engineering Center, a facility with exceptional capabilities
and equipment.
Yes, the process of design is meant to optimize the subjective listening
experience. But how does one know what
to optimize? When are four conductors,
or forty-eight, better than one, and why?
How? And are these things
practical to manufacture? Galen, with
his grasp of wire and cable theory, was as well situated as anyone has ever
been to figure these things out.
In this blog, and on this site, we endeavor to take you behind the curtain to
understand our product — to understand WHY Iconoclast cables are made the way
they are and what Galen did to bring them about. Instead of “pay no attention to that man
behind the curtain,” we’re committed to openly discussing and showing our
work. A product like this should have a
sound technical rationale, and in addition to Galen’s papers on this site, we
will bring you fresh posts from Galen’s work from time to time to talk about
issues in wire and cable generally, and Iconoclast specifically.
But, back to that rainbow we’ve been unweaving and reweaving. While the realm of engineering is where the
rubber meets the road in terms of delivering the sound, there’s no substitute
for listening. That is, after all, the
point, and ultimately the only point.
We invite you to have a listen to Iconoclast.
But we won’t ask you to leave your brain at the door when you do. We also invite you to read Galen’s papers on
the design of Iconoclast, and if you have questions, let us know.