The designers of the Swiss Cables obviously have a clear understanding of the long history of cable design, especially about what worked exceedingly well and why. The inner structure of their products reminds me a little of the fabled Western Electric cables of yore and some principles found in their design.

But the Swiss are far from having simply repackaged a role of Western Electric wires in a new shell. Actually, their cables are a blank sheet design, starting from scratch. As designers for their cables, Swiss Cables has commissioned Lumen White Research in Switzerland, a company known, between others, for their ingenious loudspeakers designs.

In the early 70s, Pierre Johannet of the French National Institute for Electric Research published an article in the French High End magazine “L’Audiophile” on his research surrounding MDI, signal distortions in cables caused by electrical micro-discharges at the conductor-dielectric junction. MDI distortions occur predominantly in the presence of synthetic polymer dielectrics, the very materials which practically dominate modern audio cable design! While the engineers at Western Electric did not know about MDIs yet, they used natural insulators like cotton and silk for their cables, as synthetic polymers were not yet available. 

Swiss cables avoid the generation of MDIs in their cables, inter alia, by using a dielectric made from natural fibers which bears at least some visual resemblance with the Western Electric textile insulations. The Swiss Cables use air as their main dielectric. Materials widely found in cables today, like Teflon, are explicitly excluded from the Swiss Cables designs - for sonic reasons. While the Swiss cables’ diameter could remind one of a decent gardening hose, when lifted up they prove to be surprisingly light. Their protective shell is very solid and does not deform easily, hence the cables are not the overly flexible during installation behind racks.