INTERVIEW: PAUL SPELTZ, ANTICABLES

K.E. Heartsong (KEH): How did music affect your early life? Was there a family member or another person, who inspired your love for music (art, design)?

Paul Speltz (PS)My parents told me that when I was just a couple of years old, I would spend hours on a spring suspended rocking horse, bouncing to whatever music they had playing on the living room console stereo. Seems like my love for music started earlier than my memory recalls. Later, we got a piano in the house that my mom and sisters played.  To be different, I took to playing acoustic guitar, which my dad encouraged as he loved campfire singalongs.

KEH: Did you grow up around a record player? So many folks that I know did not and it seems strange to me having grown up when I did.

PS: Yes, the living room console was a piece of fine furniture with an AM/FM radio, record changer, and stereo speaker all built in. I still remember the first LP I bought to play on it, "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy", and the first 45, "Bohemian Rhapsody". I still have them today. I was 13 years old and both of those were newly released that year (1975). The record store was a 2 mile bike ride away. It would be 3 more years before I was able to drive to the mall.

KEH: What was your first system then? How did you listen, in terms of Digital or Analog? How did it make you feel?

PS: Digital was not available yet. As gifts and using gifted money, I put together an analog system in my bedroom. A used BSR turntable, a Craig 5001 receiver, and Pioneer 8 inch two-way bookshelf speakers. Mom let me use her tapered hexagonal planter boxes as speaker stands. Turned upside down, they looked more like they were for speakers than for flowers. Good memories. 

I was coming-of-age, so having my own system and being able to play my own music in my private space, helped me feel more grown up. Especially because my system sounded a lot better than my parent's console system.

KEH: What musicians did you admire, enjoy, and love as a young man? Why?

PS: Since I played guitar, I was initially drawn to a lot of acoustic guitar artists. James Taylor, America, Willie Nelson, and Jackson Browne all come to mind. My music interests have broadened considerably through the decades, so my collection is quite eclectic now. 

KEH: Most memorable epiphany that has come from listening to music or turning other people on to music?

PS: A decade or more ago, I learned how to do Transcendental Meditation. Once I was able to settle into the process enough that I could experience what it felt like to be in a meditative state, I realized it was already familiar to me. It was a state that music could put me into. If you have ever been listening to music (live or pre-recorded), and have had your mind go quiet enough that you lose your internal narrative and track of time, you have been there too. I discovered that music is my meditation. 

KEH: What catalyzing event put you on the road to high-end audio?

PS: My 8th grade Music Appreciation class teacher taught us typically classical music techniques such as hocket, drone, vibrato, counter point, etc., then gave us extra credit for discovering those same techniques used in contemporary popular music. This got me actively listening to music and hungry for a better sounding audio system.

KEH: Where did you begin the “apprenticeship” of learning or gaining your knowledge for what it is you do now?

PS: I took very well to my High School Electronics class, so that is what I majored in at college. While in school, I teamed up with a cabinet making friend and together we built custom speakers for fellow college students. This gave us some fun money which I spent on bigger and better speakers and gear. My last self designed and built college speakers were possibly the best on campus and are still in use by a friend who bought them nearly 40 years ago. 

I still hold my career "day job" as the Senior Electronic Engineer for a Telecom equipment manufacture; a job I landed 39 years ago. I've spent my engineering career designing circuits that transmit analog signals down a twisted pair of wires. This has given me a strong base of knowledge for developing audio cables. 

With my career "day job" paying the bills, Anticables has been a source of "fun" money, just like speaker building did for me in college. I want to always keep audio enjoyable for our customers and myself, so I've made sure that I don't need to "make-a-sale" to "pay-the-mortgage". 

KEH: How did the company initially begin?

PS: Anticables started by solving a problem I had in my own system. Back in 2001, I designed and built an Autoformer to make my 4 ohm speakers look like 16 ohms. I did this so that my OTL tube amp was happy driving them. When I shared how well they worked in an audio chat room, I got requests to make 10 more. When those audiophiles shared how well they worked in their system, I got requests to make 20 more. I named them the ZERO-Autoformers because they are shaped round like a zero.

The autoformer itself is unchanged from 23 years ago. Its only original weakness was its lead-out wires. They were PVC jacketed stranded copper wire. PVC has a high Dielectric Constant so its high Relative Permittivity causes a lot of Dielectric Effect Distortion, which time smears the music signal. This distortion accumulates with wire length, so customers that ordered the ZERO-Autoformers with longer lead-out wire were not nearly as impressed as those with short lead-out wires. 

My solution was to replace the lead-out wire's PVC jacketing with PTFE (Teflon), which has much lower Relative Permittivity. This was quite helpful but the silver plated stranded copper wire inside caused its own distortions. The dis-similar metals cause a metallic /electronic sound that I have been told is due to a diode like effect caused by the dis-similar metal plating. There was also a "sizzling" sound in the highs that I attribute to current jumping that happens with all stranded wire I have heard. 

Determined to get it right on my third attempt, I spent six months understanding what I just described above and came up with an excellent sounding simple solution. Solid core, high purity copper wire, with an extremely thin coating instead of typical thick plastic jacketing. This wire was so good sounding, that customers started asking me to make speaker cables for them with it.  I eventually started calling them Anticables Speaker Wires and they became so popular that I named the business Anticables.

KEH: Biggest mistake you ever made at Anticables? What did you learn from it?

PS: I rode Anticables initial success wave too long before making an effort to push the technology forward. Ever since then, I am continually looking for, and implementing, ways to improve our products. For example, our entry level speaker wires still look quite the same as they did 21 years ago, but they have gone through 9 notable improvements since then.

KEH: What do you believe sets Anticables apart from the other high-end audio cable?

PS: The "Anti" part of our name easily sets us apart from other cables. Since cables are wires surrounded with thick jacketing, and since we use an extremely thin 0.001" coating on our copper wire instead, we have sidestepped one of the major contributors of what makes cables sound like cables. Beyond the 0.001" red coating, there is nothing else but air, and air does not generate Dielectric Effect Distortion. 

KEH: What is Anticables' driving philosophy, its goals for the future?

PS: 1) We use only the materials needed (solid core wire and connectors). 

2) We make sure those materials are of very high sound quality. 

3) We eliminate all unnecessary materials as much as possible (No thick plastic jacketing). 

Doing these three things, we are able to achieve our greatest goal, that is to offer much better sound at much lower cost. I continue to push these goals now and forward into the future.

KEH: I’ll bring this part of the interview to a close with a question on ethos and philosophy. Tell me, what is Anticables' overall ethos?

PS: To always remember what it's like to be a music living audio enthusiast. To recognize that this is a fun hobby and to do our best to help keep it that way. 

KEH: What is your current reference system or your best high- end system of all time?

PS: The best is never a past system and always the present system. Discovering improvements feeds the excitement of this hobby from a hardware standpoint. In addition to electronics from Bel Canto and my trade show partners Clayton Shaw Acoustics, Linear Tube Audio, and Spatial Audio, my two design partners and I have developed our own speakers and power amplifiers for our reference systems. Our audio systems are for our enjoyment, but even more-so, they are also our best tools for developing our products.

KEH: What are your five favorite albums of all time and why?

PS: When I have background music playing while I'm working around the house, I'll set an album to repeat, so that I can stay busy. There are a handful of albums that I can enjoy repeating for hours.  There is certainly something that makes these very listenable to me. 

• Rachmaninoff - Eiji Oue, Minnesota Orchestra – Symphonic Dances / Vocalise

• Exotic Dances From The Opera - Eiji Oue, Minnesota Orchestra

• HÆLOS – Full Circle

• Kraftwerk – Tour De France

• Eric Clapton – Pilgrim

• Willie Nelson – Spirit

• Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Greendale

• Portishead – Dummy

KEH: Is there anything that I’ve not covered, that you would like to share or address concerning Anticables?

PS: I have spent my entire career, both as an Electronic Engineer and as an audio cable designer, designing toward simplicity, rather than complexity. The more simple a design of anything is, the easier it is to be able to discover, understand, and control all the variables at hand, which leads to a higher quality product. 

For those of you wanting to learn more about insulating material's Dielectric Constant and Relative Permittivity that causes Dielectric Effect Distortion, this wikipedia web page is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_permittivity   It touches on how insulating materials, other than air, have the ability to store magnetic energy.  This also helps explain why Electrolytic capacitors (that have very high Relative Permittivity), are smaller than film caps, but also a lot worse sounding. 

KEH: Paul thank you for your time and your answers, which have allowed us to get a very good sense of who you are, greatly appreciated.

AKRM