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TheMightyBen

7:40 PM on 9 January, 2009

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That is an amazing idea, I bet all the chiselers out there are biting their lips! I wonder though, is there a problem with interference without the usual sheath around the cables? I have difficulty imagining how this works with speakers that have to be wired, be interesting to see a usage video. Loving the CES coverage btw guys - keep it up!

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ilovethemonkeyhead

7:57 PM on 9 January, 2009

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also love the frantic spelling mistakes, too :D

i'd gladly love to have these cables exposed and running patterns all along my walls

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ChaosDefinesOrder

8:33 PM on 9 January, 2009

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any pictures of these going round corners? I imagine the current wouldn't like being folded in those flatwires so there must be some way of "bending" the cable in some way...

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Ryan131

12:19 AM on 10 January, 2009

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paint over them?

i'd show them off! they look well cool!

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Singularity

1:11 AM on 10 January, 2009

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Absolutely ingenious in principle, but how about isolation? Isn't that the reason cables are cylindrical in the first place?

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ChaosDefinesOrder

3:06 AM on 10 January, 2009

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Actually the reason cables are traditionally thick and cylindrical is because of resitance. The thinner a wire, the higher the resistance and the more power lost as heat. It appears that the flatwire guys have found a way to get round this resitance problem - possibly by increasing the lateral thickness to compensate?.

As for isolation, I think you're referring to EM shielding, where the wire itself acts like an antenna and any surrounding EM sources, like TVs, computer hardware, microwaves and mobile phones (duh duduh duh duduh duh duduh duh!) causing intereference of hissing on speaker wires especially, with this usually being remedied by having a grounded wire shield around the signal wire to deliberately pick up this noise and "dispose" of it. It's not clear what Flatwire has done to solve this, but they must have done something or they simply wouldn't be able to market it! maybe it's in the lamination, maybe it's why the last picture shows wiggly cables instead of straight? It's also worth bearing in mind that high end speaker wire is just that - wire with a plastic sheath, no shielding... It's RCA jacks that have the shielding and they're also the ones depicted in the last photo with wiggly wires...

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Riyad

7:19 AM on 10 January, 2009

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Actually there is no problem at all bending the cables around corners. In fact you can fold the cables completely flat on themselves in order to change direction by 90 degrees.

The power cable is particularly interesting, since it's actually made up of five layers. The two outer layers are ground wires, the next two are neutral, and the live is a single central wire. That does make the power cable slightly thicker, but you'd still barely notice it.

@The Mighty Ben - when you say "speakers that have to be wired", I assume you're asking how do you connect the flat cable to the speaker terminals. The answer is that there are custom banana plugs that attach to the flat cable, and then connect to your speakers.

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John McLean

1:01 PM on 12 January, 2009

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Speaker wire carries an amplified signal, so is actually quite resilient to interference, hence why speaker cables generally don't have any form of shielding. The cables that are much more susceptible are (a) line-level analogue audio and video, and (b) high-bandwidth digital connections (e.g. ethernet). These have to be designed to minimise interference in order to preserve the signal, which is why ethernet uses twisted pairs and AV cables are commonly coaxial. Earthed sheaths can also help.

So, the flat speaker cables won't need interference shielding - they just need to be able to carry a reasonably large current without introducing undesirable resistance or (worse still) reactance into the equation. I presume the squiggly cables are a form of twisted pair.

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