Thanks for your interest, AndrewA. I'm a little biased, so I'll leave the subjective commentary to other contributors.
I'd like to thank James, Norbert, Jeff, Sunil, and Phil for their kind comments. I will soon be adding product photographs to the Empirical Design web site; the test run went well last week, and I hope to have the final images ready to post this week. In the upcoming months, I will also adding supplemental design details, as requested by technically oriented customers. I've been spending most of my time lately with a soldering iron in hand, in order to satisfy the unprecedented growth in demand that Empirical Design has been so fortunate to experience throughout this past year. I appreciate everyone's patience while I bring the web site up to date.
I'd like to offer some clarification to the September 9 comments from NagysAudio. Most of the cables that Norbert describes are older designs that are no longer in production (though I do have a few remaining samples on the shelves -- first come, first served!). The current Empirical Design Analog Interconnect Cables use a star-quad (422) or twisted pair (222) geometry, with Neutrik RCA, XLR, or TRS plugs that are best suited for these specific designs. The current 213 Speaker Cable uses a parallel, bonded pair of braided tubular conductors, with direct-soldered, low mass spade lugs or thin-wall banana plugs, rather than the twisted conductors and two-piece WBT connectors of the old Omniwire Speaker Cable. The current third-generation 118 Digital Cable remains a coaxial cable, which of course it must if it is to satisfy the technical requirements of the S/PDIF specification.
The original first-generation Omniwire cable was indeed inspired by the far more expensive Goldmund Lineal cable, with which I was quite familiar, having served as Goldmund's U.S. Customer Service Director from 1989 until 1993. I used the Goldmund Lineal Cable as an acknowledged industry reference while designing Omniwire back in 1993. By my third prototype, I had a cable that equaled the performance of the Lineal, and by my seventh prototype, I had one that handily surpassed that of the Goldmund Cable. (I still have all of those prototypes in storage.)
The original Omniwire cable did end up sharing a specific design element in common with the Goldmund Lineal cable: a silver-plated, copper covered steel center conductor, though it was based on a different military-grade specification than was the Goldmund cable. As the design process progressed, it became undeniably apparent that basic cable geometry was only one factor influencing the final sonic performance. This design was superseded in 1999 by Omniwire II, which incorporated completely different conductor and dielectric materials.
The Omniwire and successor Omniwire II cables were intended to be universal interconnect cables (hence the name), suitable for use at both analog audio and digital (RF) frequencies. After I introduced the entirely new 222 Analog Interconnect Cable in 2002, and then its higher performance big brother, 422, I was free to fully optimize a coaxial cable design specifically for S/PDIF digital frequency range transmission. The current 118 digital cable, introduced in 2004, does continue to employ the Sound Connections (Vampire) CX RCA and BNC connectors, which remain the connectors of choice for proper geometric termination of a coaxial cable topology, especially if the manufacturer cares about long-term stability and reliability.
