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Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
A Look Behind
Sept. 2010
Basics
Technology sounds pretty pretentious. Therefore, we rather discuss here the basic principles
for developing our products, so aficionados - like yourself - may easier understand why our
products are as they are.
Heavens Gate Audio is not a typical audio cable manufacturer: While we are more business
oriented, better organized and more advanced in measurment equipment than most of the
other High-End audio cable manufacturers, we believe in physics rather than in marketing.
Planning Is Everything
If you want to make the best, you have to prepare it long time in advance. Sometimes, you
even have to create new technologies, which is immensely expensive and extensive.
You can say we are slow. This is true! We do not accept to follow the market, issuing new
products each time a new fancy idea gets in the mood. We prefer to follow a clear and predetermined
development path based on real technology development, trying to avoid sharp
turns.
This protects our customers. They pay for having the best and would not understand if we
had to change our position each morning...
Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
Welcome
You are welcome to learn more about the ‘things’ we are doing to make Heavens Gate Audio
products the way they are. Please take your time. Enjoy a glas of wine, relax and think about
every word as critical as you can. Some statements might be strange for you and if you have
any question, please feel free to contact us any time! Enjoy...
Step 1 - Conductor Material
When we started to find the perfect conductor material for audio applications we took a
closer look at the following materials:
Copper: a relatively cheap material, good conductivity, poor high-frequency resolution,
delicate to mechanical resonances
Silver: the price for pure silver is about 100 times higher as for copper, excellent
conductivity, very open and fast sound, poor bass control, extremely
vulnerable to resonances, changes sound quality over the time
Gold: about 60 times the price of Gold, good bass and midrange resolution, very
slow in transient, no high frequency details
Platinum: even more expensive than Gold, good attack, very short transient, no
emotions and no “groove”.
Palladium: half the price of Gold, no high frequency resolution, useless for audio
applications
Carbon: we used pure carbon, silver plated carbon and metallized carbon. Carbon
offers excellent resonance properties but also a very poor bandwidth resulting
in a slow and muddy sound experience. For shielding a cable it is perfect.
Hydrargyrum: because this metal is liquid under normal room temperature, is has no own
resonances. Perfect sound but due to its toxicity not applicable for audio
applications.
Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
Step 1 - Conductor Material (continued)
Every material mentioned on the previous page has it’s own sonic character but there is no
material perfect in all aspects.
Some manufacturers are claiming that the use of high purity copper like 7N, 8N or even 9N is
the way to go. We believe that pure copper is not good for the use in high-quality audio
cables. One of the biggest problems of pure copper is the material fatigue because of the
recrystalization process - even at room temperatures. Pure copper changes it’s resonance
behaviour over a period of 3-4 months dramatically resulting in a loss of high frequency
resolution.
Pure silver is another way to go. This material offers a tight, clean and very detailed sound
experience while it tends to compression and poor harmonics resulting in a harsh high
frequency range.
Copper and silver are choosen because of their excellent conductivity. However, conductivity
is not important! The following table shows the conductivity of various materials:
Silver: 61,4 · 106 A/(V · m)
Copper: 59,1 · 106 A/(V · m)
Gold: 45,5 · 106 A/(V · m)
Platinum: 9,43 · 106 A/(V · m)
Palladium: 9,26 · 106 A/(V · m)
Hydrargyrum: 1,04 · 106 A/(V · m)
We have build an interconnect cable consisting of 5mm teflon tubes filled with hydrargyrum
(also known as quicksilver or mercury) and 5cm long tails of pure copper and silver at each
end. The result was astonishing and the best we have ever achieved. However, this material
is so dangerous, that it is not applicable for audio applications at all.
Look at the conductivity of hydrargyrum: it is - compared to other materials - the worst you
can get. So, what does it make sounding so good???
Hydrargyrum is a liquid metal and it has no own resonance!
Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
Step 1 - Conductor Material (continued)
Resonance???
This is one of the things we really take care about at Heavens Gate Audio.
All Heavens Gate Audio products uses conductor materials that employ a mixture of silver,
copper and gold to avoid a “sonic stamp” given by just one material.
It is the right mixture of materials that avoids these problems inherent in most other audio
cables. Basically, we use AgCu3 (pure silver with 3% copper), AgAu3 (pure silver with 3% gold)
and 4N silver (pure silver).
But how to avoid the problems of recrystallization? Most audio cables looses high-frequency
resolution and harmonics over a period of time. A special soft annealing process for all our
conductor materials was a first step into the right direction but still, the sound behaviour
changed in the course of time.
We started to research the behaviour of magnetically treated conductor materials and this
process is the only way to avoid the problems of recrystallization over many years. After the
soft annealing process all conductor materials are magnetically treated for up to 3 weeks by
being “stored” in an magnetic field of extremely high strength.
We also tried cryogenic treatments but the results have not been as good as the
magnetically treatment. The positive effects of cryogenic treatments do not last long enough
and after 3 - 4 weeks they are gone.
Insulation & Dielectrics
The best insulation would be a vacuum, which is not possible within an audio cable. Air or
Helium is the second best choice, but putting our conductors into a Teflon tube filled with
gas would make the final cable to big, as we are using up to eight conductors for an
interconnect.
Therefore, we decided to use a Air-Foam-PFA. PFA is a fluoroplastic material similar to PTFE
and FEP, but with even better dielectric properties.
Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
Step 2 - Construction
Flat cables with parallel members typically have the highest propagation speed and the
widest bandwidth with some of them passing signals freely into the gigahertz region. Coaxial
cables are also relatively high propagation speed, wide bandwidth designs. Flat and coaxial
cables are the designs of choice for digital and radio frequency transmission.
When these extremely wide bandwidth cables are used for non-digital audio applications,
they are particularly subject to noise infiltration along the entire length of the cable, much
like an antenna.
Inductance and capacitance need to be controlled carefully in an audio cable. Too much or
too little of either characteristic will provide undesirable results.
In lengths suitable for most home audio systems, these cables have too much bandwidth for
audio applications and are particularly subject to noise infiltration. Another problem is the
point at which these cables achieve electrical resonance; i.e., the point at which inductive
reactance equals capacitive reactance.
To control the inductance and capacitance of our cable designs, we simply apply electrical
and physical basic principals.
This might sound crude, but at Heavens Gate Audio it becomes a very complex story. Up to
sixteen single conductors are put together by hand to form a unique wire-weave-pattern
that controls the electrical behavior of the cable. This is one of the reasons why a Heavens
Gate Audio product can never be changed in lengths once it is made.
A proprietary combination of Silver-Gold-Alloys and Silver-Copper-Alloys for the positive
signal path and pure 4N Silver for the return is the result of countless hours of listening to
various constructions. We believe that only a mix of various materials result in a detailed
sound experience without any harshness.
Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
Step 3 - Shielding
You may not realize how much low-level noise is robbing your system of its potential.
If the audio cables used in your music system are not shielded properly, every signal path is
like an antenna to unwanted noise. All Heavens Gate Audio products reject noise!
Noise at any point in the signal chain inhibits the ability of your music system to reveal all
the subtle nuances of tone, body and dimension that are encoded in your favorite music
material. These subtle nuances are the critical elements that help us to suspend our belief
that we are only listening to electronic signals. They are the critical elements that bring our
listening experiences to life.
Using conductors and a cable design, that allows a very wide bandwidth and propagation
speed, make an efficient shielding necessary.
Shielding, however, influences the capacitance and the inductance of an audio cable and it is
absolutely necessary to design a perfect shield for any cable and any length.
The Active-Shield-Matrix invented by Heavens Gate Audio uses different shields to protect
the audio signal against any source of noise, like electro-magnetically-interference (EMI),
radio-frequency-interference (RFI) or electro-static-interference (ESI).
Most audio cable manufacturers use one or two shields to protect the signal carrying
conductors. At Heavens Gate Audio we use up to eight shields while some of them are
connected to signal the carrying conductors at exactly defined points.
Our goal was to create a shield that perfectly rejects high frequency noise, offers excellent
mechanical damping properties, is flexible in order to avoid an unwanted stiffness of the
final cable and does not affect the electrical parameters of the cable design.
For high frequencies the surface of the shielding material is more important than the center
of the material itself and therefore we use a mixture of pure 4N Silver and silver palted
Carbon - simple but very efficient.
Heavens Gate Audio
i n t e l l i g e n t a u d i o s o l u t i o n s
Step 4 - Connectors, parts and manufacture
To be continued...
Step 4 - Listening
To be continued...
Step 5 - Final words
To be continued...
