Audio: The cables aren't made of gold anyway!

I always hear people talking about cables and tone, whether they are guitarists or Hi-fi enthusiasts, and I think there is quite a lot of dodgy folk-lore about what is actually going on with regard to the design decisions made on using certain metals, like gold, nickel and copper, in their construction. I have a certain amount of experience in this field and would like to put a few things straight.

Work: DigiCo SD7

At the Rick Wakeman show I worked on, detailed in an earlier post (here), I had a chance to work with a remarkable bit of audio technology, the DigiCo SD7. This is an audio mixing console that can be used in any audio mixing application; from live front of house and monitoring, to post production and broadcast console use. In the former of those scenarios, you can actually link the two consoles via gigabit ethernet, and they can communicate, sharing various information, including complete remote control and a webcam so you can see who's on the other desk Check out that link for it and have a read. It really is remarkable, and extremely pretty (so many lights and screens!!). It currently retails, at time of writing, for somewhere in the region of £120,000 and is customisable on order with various upgrades. Check out the pics (now updated with some images I took at the time!):