Air is as close to vacuum as is practically achievable.

Personally, I like Owens Corning Pink Panther insulation. It's big, pink, and has a good R-value.

It's going to take a very tiny pink panther to lay insulation inside an interconnect . . .

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In the "other" magazine Tara is selling AIR now as the way to go, previous science of the month had vacuum, didn't it, now how can both ends of the atmospheric spectrum deliver the sonic marvels claimed by this mfg? And they tagged made in U.S.A., could that be true maybe or.......didn't they get snagged for moving labels, wonder if they also mess up when they put teh directioanl arrows on them cables, and people are listening backwards!! Thinking it sounds good, oh, that happens to one of tehm CD only $45K 3 box players, and teh man with good ears (MF) thought it sounded fine....he will hear teh sounds of wires, 10 out of 10 times...and then he has 41 Million then he can tell us where to go. Take the Pepsi challenge MF, prove you can hear what you claim. And plese publish your hearing test results, certainly it's gotta be spectacular!!!!

Aside from the unnecessary Fremer-bashing, I actually agree with you for once, DUP. At least to a point.

It doesn't bother me that people would spend $45,000 for a length of wire. I can't see myself ever doing it, but if someone wants to buy a vacuum-sealed, golden-ratioed, platinum-coated, cryogenically-treated stretch of wire that's been prayed over by a monastery full of Zen Buddhist Monks who've been chugging down Napa Valley Zinfandel from before 2003, grown on the same terroir as the factory, well, that's their prerogative. But what you should get when you spend $45,000, or even $20, on something, is what it is advertised, factually, as being. I don't care if scientifically, there's no difference between those cables and the coathanger that your Uncle Moe trashpicked to keep the trunk of his '71 El Camino shut-- as a consumer, if I'm buying what is advertised as a vacuum-sealed, golden-ratioed, platinum-coated, cryogenically-treated stretch of wire that's been prayed over by a monastery full of Zen Buddhist Monks who've been chugging down Napa Valley Zinfandel from before 2003, grown on the same terroir as the factory, then that is what I should get, not a similar-spec'ed cable filled with ordinary air that came from the factory where 12-year-old Chinese girls assembled them. And it does bug me that Stereophile (and their competition) haven't shied away from companies which have been caught red-handed either making claims out of, um, thin air, or lying about their origins.

I've been using Tara Labs' Air III interconnects in my system for a little while now. I'm really happy with them and they are considerably better (in my system) than Tara's previously top of the line Decade interconnects. They give me the characteristically full, dimensional and liquid sound that are common in Tara's cables, but these don't roll off the highs like previous Tara cables. Really nice sounding IC for a budget audio system.

Maybe it is the air?

Well, theoretically -- and I have an actual PhD in physics, so when I say "theoretically" I do mean it -- using air, or thin air, or a vacuum, as an insulator could decrease the capacitance of the cable and reduce any nonlinearities (hysteresis) involved in the polarizing of the insulation that inevitably occurs. Having said that, not only are these effects minuscule, but another, simpler method of dealing with the hysteresis "problem" (namely AQ's DBS) has been reported by other of our golden-eared friends as having no audible effect at all. Of course, if Tara found out that what makes their cable appealing to MF turned out to be (say) the tightness of the connectors, then they'd have no excuse for making super-expensive cable at all, so there's not much likelihood of their doing the study.

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...but another, simpler method of dealing with the hysteresis "problem" (namely AQ's DBS) has been reported by other of our golden-eared friends as having no audible effect at all.

But I love the idea of connected battery which does something, but never uses any power. Very fun.

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then they'd have no excuse for making super-expensive cable at all, so there's not much likelihood of their doing the study.

Matthew Bond of Tara Labs was one of the first to make available his method of measuring cables and even made available his schematics for the instrument he used for testing and measuring. He's written about his findings many times and has the best white paper on the subject that I've read to date.

I don't know Bond from Adam and don't care for the hyperbole surrounding cable advertisements, but from the standpoint of researching and understanding cable designs, he probably knows the topic better than anyone and has shared his findings with anybody that was interested.

Tara cables do sound different from any other cables I've tried.

Now, if someone wanted to go off on some of their recent business controversies, I'd probably not be so willing to interject.

Tara "labs"...yupper. Is that where teh marketing dept meets? I'd say Belden, Carol Cable,Southwire, Alpha wire would know something about wire...since they actually mfg teh stuff, for all kinds of industrys and use. Tara "labs", uhhuh...I'm sure they have done lotsa "research" and development, and they sell to what industrys besides audio phlakedom? Those white papers, that's where the real truth is. riiiiight. Tara has air and vacuum, they claim both sound better, seems a big contridiction....maybe I'll stay in teh middle, with mortal wires, that have no claims other than they connect. What won't an audiophile not beleive?

Why is hysteresis only capacitive, and not inductive? Transformers have big hysteresis, they is mostly a big inductor. Actually some hysteresis is good, it keeps things going....how do you know hysteresis makes things sound bad, just because Tara decides it's a nice technically sounding word for the gullible? Who wants to use wires where th epeople look like they are jumping up in the air like something just goosed em'...the Tara ads are mindless......made in U.S.A.? Well the profits sure are.

This is beating a dead horse, but... the hysteresis in a transformer comes mostly from the metal core. A cable is (slightly) inductive, but it's essentially an air-core inductor, so there's no way even Tara can imagine dealing with any magnetic hysteresis. And the reason hysteresis is bad (again, I emphasize, in theory) is that it is a nonlinearity in the behavior of the cable.

Y'know, somebody oughta try a variant of Hafler's old idea for comparing amps, and try to measure the difference signal coming through two analog interconnects. (Not speaker cable -- the interaction of cable impedance with the speaker impedance is well understood -- and not digital cable, which is pretty well described by what is known as the characteristic impedance. But I for one don't know what differences between interconnects of different types might rise up above the noise floor, if any.)