ACers! It's been a while. If you haven't figured it out already, if I'm quiet, it's not that I'm taking it easy, it's because I'm working my ass off on something new.
Today marks the first of MANY announcements on new tech and toys. I wanted to start by revisiting one of my favorite topics; dielectrics.
The quest to create the most ideal dielectric is hardly a new endeavor. In fact companies spend many hundreds of hours hand weaving Teflon thread dielectric matrices to reduce the amount of dielectric material touching their signal wire. Other materials are often used such as teflon and cotton. Until now all dielectrics had a multitude of compromises. In this article I hope to inform the reader about some of the technicals of why Hapa Audio’s patented Aerogel dielectric stands apart in the field of options.
Don’t be dense:Density, one of the least understood properties of a dielectric. A dense dielectric, such as Teflon, in direct contact with a wire leads to over-damp. Over-damp strips away nuance and detail from the signal wire. On the other end of the scale, air dielectrics allow for a wire to excessively ringing which causes aberrations in the time domain of a signal wire leading to a fuzzy amorphous and overly strident presentation.
One of the more recent trends in dielectrics is using cotton. Although slightly lower in density at 1.5 grams per cm³, cotton reduces density at the expense of introducing a major problem. Cotton is permeable to the environment and oxidation is inevitable over time as the internal wire is exposed to the natural humidity in any room, leading to oxidation. The result is loss of detail and a “darkening” of the soundstage over time.
With a density of 2.2 g/cm³, Teflon is very dense and tends to strip nuance and detail due to overdamping. Symptoms include boomy bass, muddled midrange, and treble detail that is hazy and bright. Despite being less permeable to the environment, it is still susceptible to oxidation as there is always a gap between wire and Teflon dielectric that exposes the wire to in room humidity.
Aerogel has the entire field beat on density and has the added benefit of being 100% hydrophobic meaning any wire clad in Aerogel is immunized against oxidation ensuring greater longevity and less loss of sound quality over time due to oxidation.
Density comparison:teflon is 2.2 g/cm³ and cotton has a density 1.5 g/cm³. So how much better can Aerogel possibly be? At a mere 6% the density of cotton and a mere 4.5% compared to Teflon, Aerogel comes in at a mind blowing
0.1 g/cm³ density, making it several orders of magnitude lighter than cotton or teflon. In fact Aerogel is the least dense solid material
known to mankind and no other dielectric can even come close.
Where air dielectric has virtually no damping properties allowing signal cables to ‘ring’ which kills nuance and spatial information, Aerogel is as close as you can get to ideal damping properties, allowing the wire to move freely without ringing allowing the signal to propagate virtually unaltered by these types of aberrations.
When light as a feather, is too heavy:If you’ve never handled Aerogel, it’s almost impossible to imagine just how light this material is. In order to demonstrate just how incredibly light Aerogel is, I enlisted the help of the insanely talented professional photographer
Tegan K. If a picture is worth a thousand words, for aerogel, this one tells the entire story.
0.1 g/cm³
At 2.5” in diameter and 0.5” in height this is the largest commercially available puck of Aerogel I could find, yet it sits atop the tip of a delicate Mallard feather. No strings attached, no post process image manipulation and absolutely no camera trickery was used in making of this photo.
(Credit: Hapa Audio, Tegan K Studios)Checkmate:With ideal vibrational damping properties, the lowest density of any solid known to man, exceptional dielectric permittivity and preservative properties disallowing oxidation, Hapa Audio’s patented Aerogel dielectric technology represents an
unbridgeable reference for high end audio dielectrics. Teflon, cotton, and air dielectrics all wilt by comparison.
In my next write up, I will discuss what this incredible material houses, Hapa Audio’s proprietary highly polished UPOCC. Because having the worlds best dielectric doesn’t matter if you’re using off the shelf UPOCC wire.
stay tuned!!!
