The Earworm Podcast - Episode 17 Why Do CABLES Matter? w/ Dariush Rad!

Episode 17 of The Earworm Podcast goes straight to one of the most overlooked links in the entire audio chain: the cable. Bryan Clark and Patrick Cloud sit down with Dariush Rad, owner of Asterope, to explore why musicians will spend thousands on guitars, microphones, pedals, preamps, and converters; then connect it all with a cable they barely think about. Dariush breaks down signal-to-noise ratio, shielding, directionality, conductor geometry, and material quality, explaining how every connection can either preserve or compromise the original signal. The conversation challenges the idea that “a cable is just a cable” and asks a bigger question: how much of the sound we’re constantly trying to fix downstream was lost before it ever got there?

Dariush also shares the unlikely story behind Asterope, including his journey from music into aerospace technology and how lessons learned developing high-performance, low-voltage avionics helped reshape his approach to audio. From copper purity and dielectric materials to Asterope’s 98% cross-braided shielding, non-metallic barrels, solid-core connectors, and lead-free silver solder, the episode gets deep into the engineering behind preserving signal integrity. It’s part audio science, part aerospace engineering, and part reminder that sometimes the biggest improvement to your tone isn’t another piece of gear.  It’s making sure the sound you already have actually makes it to the other end of the cable.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Let's talk about signals. Let's talk about audio signals. No, no. Well, that we could. We could spend a whole lifetime. But let's talk about audio signals and sort of why this whole concept of signal-to-noise ratio matters. Because for most people, they don't really give too sense about that. They're just sort of like, I don't know, I went to for guitar players. Like I was this was definitely my world. I'm I'm sure you guys were similar. You go to you buy a new guitar and you bought a little amp, and what's the first thing that you do? You get the cheapest chord that you can buy.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Because I already spent all my money on the amp and the guitar.

SPEAKER_05 0:43

Tweet signal, too signal, too much cover, cross braided, educated, no stack.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

So you're like, okay, and you go get the $10 wonder that breaks probably by the end of the week, you know, at home it starts shorting out, and you're getting all this RF and you're getting noise and everything else like that. And then your beautiful guitar through your beautiful amp sounds not so good.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

And that poor guitar center employee that sold it to you that had to listen to you tell him exactly what you wanted, had to figure it out. And then he sold you the amp and the guitar, and he's like, all right, I'm gonna sell it for this much. And then he's like, you know you need a cable too. But it feels like he's extorting you at that point. Yeah. But fuck you, buddy. Oh, you know you're gonna need a strap, you're gonna need pigs, you're gonna need it's like totally right.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

And how many of us remember? I mean, I do. I remember if I didn't have a guitar cord when I was a kid, I did not go to a music store. I could just as easily go to Radio Shack and buy one of those long, you know, super spiraled ones.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

They like the the the like the clear colored ones that you could see through the phone.

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Yes, totally. Those are very sick. Right. It's a big wolf.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

They look good. They look good. They look cool at the time. But they did not sound good. Welcome to Earworm episode 17. I'm Patrick Cloud. I'm Brian Clark. And today we have a very special guest. He's an artist, he's a musician, he's an entrepreneur, he's an author, he's a world traveler. Yeah. And his name is Dariush Rad. Darius, thanks for being here. Gentlemen, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 2:26

Our pleasure. He is Greg No. 4 for Greg number four. Greg Garius Personality. And uh we're honored to have you here. Darius is one of the few people in the world that is an expert on signal-to-noise ratio, uh. Specifically because of a technology that he has. But we're gonna lead up to that by just kind of posing this question of when you have signal-to-noise ratio, whenever you make a recording, whenever you're doing anything, you spend so much money on buying big consoles, big monitors, big expensive microphones, huge synthesizers, amps, guitars, all the instruments, right? You get everything together and everybody's making this, they're they're showing up to make a great record. And then you get really shitty cable. And what ends up happening is that all that bandwidth gets collapsed and you have a higher signal-to-noise ratio. That's just the start of it. I just want to kind of prep people for that by saying that the next time that you want to now we're not saying go snake oil like you're gonna go buy a power cable that's you know $1,000 a foot. There's a part of there's a law of diminishing return, and to be fair, there are people that are in this business, especially in the hi-fi audio, like if you're into stereos and other things in the hi-fi realm, where people want to charge you $1,000 a foot for certain types of cable.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Well they'll also tell you that you need to change your your entire fuse box at your house. It's a real thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. Because you've got a hundred items spaced out of 3,000 square feet that are gonna need to be plugged in. It's just the most preposterous thing. And at the other side of the wall, it's Romex. It's just your standard Home Depot cable that you're gonna be buying that's gonna run it. You know what I'm saying? So it's like at what point do you do that? Now there is conditioned energy in the sense of like, you know, the Equitech power and stuff like that, so you can power condition to get it stable.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

I think that's what I was referring to, where they install it at the source of all the power for the studio. Well, Equitech makes those. The Equitech makes those, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

But they basically they basically kind of do what Furman does, which is where they condition for voltage spikes. Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Because here's the thing that they take the ghosts out of the walls. They really need it in New Orleans. Like when they build a studio in New Orleans, it's like you have to do it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

I think we need to make sure that when people have circuitry that they spend money on, that given the fact that we have dirty power, you need to have the cleanest cable possible. And I mean that in the sense of like the purity of what you have. And most of the stuff that we buy isn't. Would you agree with that? Or how would you how do how do you cra how do you crack this egg on tone and signal to noise ratio and what's important? And if you're a guitar player that just bought their very first Les Paul and their very first, you know, Marshall or whatever combo amp or whatever, uh how do you how do you get this culture to just kind of go, you know, now there's one little tiny piece of the puzzle and it's getting a really good cable. And is it audible? Now I know. We know. We know. But you know, you can't, it's one of those things you lead the horse to water and you ha let them have the experience. How do you crack that?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Well, I you know, personally after 17 years of pushing this rock up the hill, and it was certainly nothing I knew anything about, right? And I think to best describe what you're describing, I call it a cultural barrier. There is a distinct cultural barrier because there has not been any major advent in standard quarter-inch cable development since Leo Fender reached up and took an old phone line switcher and said, Hey, that'll work. So there just has not been any major advent, right? And so it's been easy for all of us for all these years to under appreciate how critical signal is. It's it's it's everything, right? I mean the the the vibration, and I want to get too esoteric too early.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

But the electricity esoteric.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

I'll keep it just at the time that that high impedance place, let's just just say a guitar. That high impedance place in the pickup where the signal is most likely to get corrupted, is where it needs to most be preserved.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

At the pickup level. At source. At source.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

At the micro.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Underneath the string, you've got your poles, you've got your wire, you've got your wraps.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Just the minute it becomes the signal that you hope to amplify.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Okay. So as it leaves the guitar, as it's ready to leave the guitar, once the six once the once the the actual quarter-inch cable connects to the body of the guitar, that's the spot where like, okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. Well, I mean we take it even a step further at Astro by offering our internal wiring solutions.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Yeah. I mean, that's right at the birth of the signal.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Now that's the birth of the signal, right? Or even more if I were to if we were to start creating wind wire. But regardless, you're exactly right. It's there at that place where the signal's most likely going to get bombarded with RF, corrupted, bumped around, and that is not a good thing. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 7:43

So it's coming from the heart of the musician, the heart and soul of the musician, and you're trying to preserve that and make sure that that translation fits.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

That's it, man. I mean you think about where that spark of inspiration comes from, it's electrochemical. But ultimately, it's electromagnetic. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Right. It gets transduced. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It is.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

And then that energy is coming out the tip of your fingers. You want to preserve that. And you grab an instrument, whether it's a scalpel or a guitar or a paintbrush or a camera or whatever it is. There's real energy there. And it really deserves to be preserved and for the integrity of the intention and the spirit behind that expression to be preserved. These precious little data packets that reside inside of what? Electrons. Are being beat to hell along their conductive path. They're having to arc their way over what are called domains. And in uh with in a situation with cable and wire, most often it's copper is a conductive material. But the copper does not exist in like a substrate, like a slab of marble. It exists in what are called domains or packets. And there are gaps in between the domains. So I think of like sateotile floor, which leads to another analogy I can give. A sateotile floor.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

Trevor Burrus, I don't know what that is. What does that mean, a sateo tile floor? Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, I mean we grew up in Mexico.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

I mean we grew up in Texas. Everybody had sateo tile, the big orange big tile. Oh, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Yeah, yeah. Highly porous. Just sections.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Sections separated by gaps.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

Oh, gotcha. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

A tile floor. A tile floor. But uh but it's not a smooth tile, it's a satio tile floor.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

Trevor Burrus, Jr. So it's porous. It's got a little texture to it. Can we describe the tiles more?

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the silly. What color were they?

SPEAKER_02 9:35

They were baked in an oven. He said he didn't know what a sateo.

SPEAKER_00 9:39

I would think he would know what a sateo toe floor. Dude, you were totally if you're on what distorted medium versus a smooth medium, right? So the copper itself by nature is distorted, and the electrons are having to arc their way from domain to domain. Arcing, if we all remember young Frankenstein. You know, it's noisy and it's ugly stuff. And Tesla coil things. Absolutely aggravating and compromising the integrity of what? Trevor Burrus, Jr. Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

It's just disrupting.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

Disrupting the signal between it's distorting, disrupting, canceling, screwing it up completely. Why are we talking about tiles? Because we're describing the fact that copper does not exist as a substrate, that it exists in domains and packets. Now, if I you know the top of the floor, I'm talking about the Mexican time.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

I just didn't know what the debt was called.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

If you just said Mexican time, everything damn it for the case. Let's stop the camera. I actually knew something that Brian Clark did not. That's a celebration. Can we? Wait, wait, wait. Don't worry, this is all getting recorded.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Hey, just wait another five minutes because there's gonna be more.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

You take a tennis ball and you gently roll it on a Latino tile floor. Yes. What's gonna happen to the tennis ball? It's gonna are it's gonna go to the path of least resistance. And if it's got yumminess in it, what's gonna happen? It's gonna get banged up and beat up. Right. Right. So one of the things we've learned to do is heal the gaps between the tile. Right? Yeah. To heal the gaps so that you have more of a substrate. Right. Now if you take that same tennis ball and you go to just a polished marble floor and you gently roll it, what happens? Oh, it's gonna be amazing. And it skates. Yeah. It's fast. Yeah, very little resistance. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And the integrity of what's in there, it's preserved along the conductive path.

unknown 11:37

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

For longer distances. For longer distances, faster.

SPEAKER_02 11:40

Trevor Burrus So uh and when you say we, we're talking about Astarope, which we haven't sort of done, but the what you do so magically and what Astrope does so magically, and I can say this as a as an endorsee, um non-paid, uh but um and and I would never w want to be paid because I believe in the product so much, but uh it doesn't matter what it is, it doesn't matter whether it's a what gauge of astro rope it is, it doesn't matter what use you're putting it, whether it's a speaker interconnect, whether it's to from a console to your monitors, it doesn't matter whether it's a microphone cable, guitar cable, synth cable, bass cable, it doesn't matter. I can tell you from personal experience, and I can just encourage you to have your own experience, you will hear a difference. And it's and it will be a difference that will allow you, if you play an instrument, you will become, at least this is my experience, you become more connected with the nuances that cheaper cable never gave. Monster Cable, Mogami, George L's. You put them all up to that, and I'm t I I have a deeper connection with my instrument and my touch to the strings or whatever it is that I'm trying to manipulate with this cable.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

I totally agree. You know, Brian, um, and Dariush knows I've told this story a thousand times, I think, is that I just took got one instrument cable from Dariush, I think it was I got it from you first, and I went home and I changed the cable that I was had my guitar to the amp to. That's it. And it was like, wow, if they could put this in a pedal, I'd pay a lot of money for this. You know, it's like just that's how kind of a cool thing it is. Like there are people who spend thousands of dollars to clean up their signal when really they just might need to replace their cable. Yeah. And that blew my mind. And then when we were at Oceanway and listening to the Alice and Krause track through the different uh iterations and being able every step of the way, you could hear more of her breath and more of her lips and more of her cheeks and her bones like moving and hearing that, and then the sound of the fingers on the guitar, like just the presence of that that that sound that just kept being enunciated further because it was getting more to the natural uh sound of the music in general. So those are two things that I just like have totally floored me. And we're I'm telling everybody about this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

No, thank you, brother. It's it's exciting, and those are great descriptions. I mean, it's it's like um it's a resolution, it's a function of resolution, right? Because the data in the electron is the original data is preserved better along longer lengths as well. I've got a 50-foot astrope I'll put up against anybody's 10-foot. That's a standing offer. And we'll smoke them and I'll, you know. Yeah. So so length is dealt with, transient are dealt with, but it's that beautiful thing you're describing where the presence and the r and the resonance and the resolution, just truly, the resolution is so much higher.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

It means you don't even realize that you lose. I mean it is.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

You really just don't until you have it back gained back. So what I've come to believe is that when you're able to maintain the integrity of the intention, of that electromagnetic pulse, of the data, and it arrives where it needs to go. Right. Unimpeded, that the that what the end result is is that it's it's absolutely so phase coherent that as those vibrations move into the room, they're not canceling each other out because the gear has got in the way. And I'll say this out loud and then you guys can chew on this. I have come to believe without question, not only in audio, but also in aerospace, that every piece of gear is over-engineered to try and salvage a corrupted signal that will never be salvaged. And how do we do that? Well, we sit there in front of our stereos when we're in high school or college, man. We get it all set up, we put it on the record, and the first thing we do is what? Check it out. We tweak the bass in trouble. We start adding noise to noise to do what? To simulate phase. To simulate phase. And it's a little different for everyone where that sweet spot is, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:52

Yeah, of course. Yeah, we hear it a little bit differently.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

But when you like you said, when you get everything out of the way and you just really experience the sound of what your sound of your instrument, of your mic, of your mix, gosh, man, it's like you don't need all that extra heat, all that extra amplification, all that extra modulation to try and correct the um the distorted or the corrupted signal.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

I think it's important. Case in point, I don't know if you ever you I know we've all experienced this, and I'm sure our audience has too, especially the folks that are playing live. There's this moment where like you go in, you do sound check, and you're like, yeah, man, like you do sound check and you're like, yeah, everything sounds good. My tone is happening, right? Nothing changes, nobody went, no one popped a string and had to put a new set of strings on, or you didn't lose your cable or whatever. And then all of a sudden, you get back on stage and you start playing again, and you're like, wait a minute, my tone's different. And it's the audience isn't even fully in their seats yet, right? So it's not like, oh, it's because it's a full house and it's changed. I'm just talking about your tone is different. Like the way you're interacting with your instrument is different. What is that caused from? And the reality is that a lot of cities have dirty power. And depending upon the the the the the demands that it has on the grid, you get to this point where you get a spike or you know the grid's pushing out so much stuff that if your amp is basically in a sweet spot at say 120, you could be drawing current from the wall, could be at 123, or it could be whatever, right? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

That's really interesting. I just think of like uh uh you know, you're at a venue and they turn on all the popcorn makers and all the hot dog machines, and all of a sudden the guitar player sounds different. Yeah. It's just an interesting, it's a funny concept. It's it's absolutely 100%.

SPEAKER_02 17:41

But it's absolutely 100% true because I didn't realize this and I could never figure it out for much longer than I'm comfortable admitting. And basically I got to the point where I carry a Variac around and a voltage meter. And what I would do is I would get on stage and I would measure the voltage and then I would set, because my amps generally don't run at 120. I like them sagged a little bit, or like a 117. Anyway, for certain ones. Nerd. I know, right? But hey, welcome to earworm. Yeah, right. So but like you when you do that, and so then I would uh I would go in and I would adjust the voltage to get it to 117, right? And then I would leave. And then I would come back, and after maybe the warm-up band is gone or whatever, or you're the warm-up band, whatever, you get back up on stage and I would check my meter again, and I would more often than not, I would have to make a slight adjustment. Interesting. Because the it was it had already changed. And in Nashville, it's very much that way. So and I had a guy come up and was like, hey man, what are you measuring all this stuff the wall? Do you have a Variaq? And I went, yeah, it's sitting on top of my app. And he's like, Oh, you're legit then.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

So I also think it's kind of odd that somebody will spend you know $100,000 on a vintage Les Ball or then have a $30 cable that just totally wrecks the intended nature of a PAF, right? Like so I think what's an analogy for like cars.

SPEAKER_02 18:59

It would be like if you if you bought a uh a a super exotic one of one of six. Yeah, it'd be like, right? So it'd be like or wheels, like you just put on the cheapest wheels with the cheapest hubcaps, like you know, but you had a you know a Bugatti shear on or something like that that's a you know seven million dollar car. Right. Like it makes no sense. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Yeah, put Chinese tires on it. Yeah. And it starts just shaking its way down the high.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

It'll take a cheap guitar and make it sound amazing. Oh, absolutely. Because that's because there's so much yumminess in there that's just getting quashed by a technology. And you're and to use the word, if I could, that you're using evolutionary, I d I absolutely believe that this stuff is evolutionary. Most technologies are built um in an evolutionary way. Every now and then something is revolutionary. And so it's that cultural barrier, like, oh come on, could it really, could it be and and and and sadly for some things you just have to experience them. Somebody can describe, you know, an amazing film or an amazing food or an amazing uh, you know, moment or location. And some things just have to be experienced. You know, you can hear about it, but I think you're right, Brian. I think there is such a cultural barrier because there has not been any major advent in this realm. Um I don't want to s not say ever, because there are some fine cable manufacturers out there that I respect tremendously, but I think overall it is the way understated um component in the in the signal path. And like you said, whether, you know, why can't you spend so much money on your guitar, your amp, not to mention how much of your life you pour into honing your craft, and then you you trust the most precious component and the entire expression. The data, the expression, the electromagnetic reflection of your heart to anything inferior, then um then it's sad.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I think I think it's funny that you said that it's there hasn't been like these these moments, but I can tell you that anybody that uses Astro does think that it is an an advent in technology. They know that it is and that's what it is. It's a matter of getting people to hear it. I want to go back to the technology for a second, because something that I learned from you uh that I did not know before was is about the directionality of the way that the electrons behave. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Yeah, yeah, but it's cool. And there's so many people go, oh, that's BS. It's not. It's not.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Right. I think a lot of people are gonna say that.

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:51

They're like, oh, how does an electron know which way to flow? You know, like one end is just as good as the other. Why don't they say, you know, this is the this is the forward end and the and the back end.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

And naturally it will, you know, I mean you can know about the nature of the flow both ways, up and down. But it is, it's it's a physics thing. And that's been another thing, I think, for us, regardless over the over all these years, and really, really brilliant engineers and brilliant techs and brilliant OEMs. But the minute they plug it in, they're just like, wow, wait a minute. So on the directionality thing, a couple of things. When you take a conductive material, in our case copper, and it's liquid and it's in a vat, and you're pulling it in our case extremely very high-stranded solution, right? Most of our competitors have strands, you know, and we have many strands. But when you pull that, the direction that you're pulling the conductive material into that fine strand of wire, there's a crystalline structure at a molecular level. And that crystalline structure tends to want to line a certain way, right? And the direction it's being pulled. And the direction it's being pulled. So not to say that it can't go the other way, but there's just a tendency that that would I believe, if we think of it magnetically right, or if you were to think about nonlinear magnetics or standard magnetics, you're there's there's just an energetic tendency. We we know what we're talking about when it rains and static changes and stuff. So that's part of it. And then um and I'll circle back on that one. We also tie the shield. We have a heavy-duty, like 98% cross-braided shield, not a spiral shield. If you have a spiral shield and I do that, what happens? Everything here is getting bathed by RF, RF, whatever's in the room, email. Yeah. So it's cross-braided, like a a finger trap. And we tie the shield on the load end or the outbound end or the amp end, right? You have source and load. Why would we do that? Because if it's picking up any noise, if it's picking up any noise or any malevolent frequencies, you want to dump them at the amp. You don't want to dump it back into an instrument, right, where that signal is so frail. So that's real, right? So it's uh it's called telescopic grounding, and we tie our shield telescopically. And then I've got a brother um who is an engineer at Boeing. He just retired, and he we were talking about this um the first announc the first component, right, which is just the crystalline structure. And he said, Darge, think about this. He had we've both grown up in Rodoso, up in the mountains. And so do you remember in the winter when the river would freeze? Yeah. He said, So And this is another thing. If we just think the whole day about electricity and water, we're gonna be really good, right? Because we're talking about water moving through a pipe and all the different things in the pipe that can affect the flow from contaminants to laminar flow to all these different things that can actually affect the fluidity of of the flow. But he said, okay, look, Dark, so the current in the river, when it's moving down an icy stream, if you get really close and look at all that ice and the and the structure that it's containing the energy, you'll notice the crystals in the ice starting to follow the current. Right? So hi-fi guys will take their wire and it won't be good wire to them until they've burned it in for a hundred or two hundred hours, and it's legit. No, and it's legit. That's amazing. Yeah, no, and it's part of look, that's where our wire was originally developed was for hi-fi, right? And those guys try to beat that thing, and you need a lot of money to try to get people to get it, and it's a noisy neighborhood, and ironically, two or three of the absolute best players in that field, Jenna Labs and Terra Labs and all these guys, they're all coming out of aerospace. So my story's been kind of weirdly going to be a little bit of a lot of people. Going into aerospace, yeah. But um, but they get it. And it has little settlements, those guys are like weaving their conductors and stuff at a certain distance because of capacitance and the adducts it gets affected. And there's and it's real science. We've just got our formula and did not want to, I just didn't want to play in that field. And because I'm a musician and all my best friends are artists and brothers, I wanted them to experience and them to have it. So that's um that explained, does that help with the other.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Well it does, yeah, it actually uh uh explains it quite well. And you actually mentioned, you know, going into aerospace, and I know that's been a big part of your journey this year. Um and I think as a as a musician, is like and Brian, like we love the top end of nurdery, right? Like from from Star Wars to um you know sampling TC Electronics, 25-year-old fireworks things to get to get sounds. We like technology. It's really interesting to us. And when I found out that there's a studio cable, guitar cable that I already love that is going into aerospace, I feel like that's something that should be shouted from the mountains. Like it's like I think a lot of musicians, especially studio people, really love the fact that something's high technology, right? Because it tells them that they're thinking about us too, right? So what was the the impetus for you wanting to to take that side of the division and and start showing it to people?

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Well, before I go into that, I want to I honestly want to say thank you because the timing on our meeting and and and getting together on this has been serendipitous on that front specifically, because when I first honestly, like what took me into that? Me wanting to get the hell out of the music business. I mean, it just wrapped up a five-year stint with um Larry Fishman as my distributor, who is an absolute um best friend, brother, mentor, uncle, big brother, whatever. I mean, Larry's Larry's a cat. You know, he's one of the godfathers of the MI industry, sharp as hell. It's a guy that would spend half his day at MIT and the other half at Berkeley, you know. And so talk about music and science and really having a head and just a good business head and all.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And for those folks who aren't in guitar land or acoustic guitar land, Fishman is one of the joggernauts of this industry that makes all kinds of products for acoustic uh you know, acoustic guitars to be amplified. I mean pickups were always like the acoustic pickups were like, yeah, the prog guys like Polyphia and those guys, you know. Fluence pickups.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

It's not coil-wound, which is really Yeah, and it's a different sound.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

Totally. It is a different sound.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

And then you know they've obviously dipped into other things too, like you know, uh effect processing and modeling and stuff like that for acoustic guitars. But yeah. Mostly an acoustic instrument like stuff and acoustic amps and stuff. Violins and I mean everything.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

He's had a great, a great career, continues to, and just develops a lot of super cool stuff. And we had a mutual friend, um, Bill Vornick, who was one of the quintessential acoustic recording engineers and probably I would say one of the most loving educator mentors. If anybody carried the mentor spirit um in Nashville and beyond, it was Bill Vorndick. But if it was being recorded and it was acoustic, it was Allison Krauss or Charlie Hayden or Mumford and Sons, he did all the Bella Fleck records. I mean, Bill was a cat, and we had a mutual friend, and the first time he heard it, he was just like, Dorish. Larry Fishman needs to hear this. And I'm like, oh, that'd be cool. So about two, three months later, I get a call and he's like, hey, dude, it's Larry Fishman. And I'm like, oh, come on. He's like, no, D, it's Larry. And I'm like, well, I guess Bill got through to him. You know, Bill sends me a cable, and I'm sitting on the I'm sitting on this thing for like three months. I said, Yeah, I did too, man. It was like, come on, it's freaking cable, you know? Literally three months before I repliced the prototype I'd been given in. And um he said, Christ, man, I was in my lab till six in the morning. I can just hold this shit over a piece of gear and it sounds better. God bless Larry, who to this day says Astarope is the most disruptive technology in the entire industry because it just makes everything sound good. And it's super cool because it's an ubiquitous product. You know, it's not like just guitars or just bass or just studio or just stage. Right. Everything is connected with cable, and I don't even like to use the word, and hopefully one day everything will be connected with asteroid, which is different. And we have got to find ways to differentiate ourselves because of that cultural barrier.

SPEAKER_02 30:50

But car stereo, like these home, these competitive car stereo thing and the guy who's won the world championship.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

I saw him for the second by half a point. Oh my god. And he said, All right, sometimes it's political because it's just the two of us now, we keep winning, so it goes back and forth. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

But he's won it multiple, multiple times. And he's wiring these joggernaut systems of car stereo that have like, I don't know how many hundreds and hundreds of watts of offer. But amplification with Asteroid for high-end car stereo.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Trevor Burrus, Jr. He was like in class C when we met. He was the tech out at Skyway, Brian Gill, he's a sweetheart of a guy. So Brian's in like class three, and we put somewhere, just like a couple of runs to maybe one set of speakers, and he went into the class A. And he said, Dar, you jumped two classes. And everybody said, What did you do? And he's like, he's really sweet about it. He opened the back, he's got a little asteroid logo on the back of his thing. I said, Well, let's put some more in there. And he and he went, he got, he hopped up on the podium. Now, in the first class, he's on the podium. It came back, and I'm like, Well, there's only one thing we should we should bywire your sub. So I put the 16 gauge on his sub. He went back and he's just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He keeps wondering, because guys, we live in an electric universe, and it's all phase and it's all energy. And if we can find a way to take that spark and amplify it. How do we get back to spaceships? Trevor Burrus, Jr. You're a good man. So the Larry, the Larry, the Larry Fishman thing, it was a long, hard push, right? And just guys, you know, just business, being a business owner is not always like, oh, you own a business. Can we have free this and that? It's hard, man.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

It's a lot of that, though.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

So he takes me to a meeting with a guy from the NSA. He said, you need to pivot. You need to find another application for this technology. He said, if this stuff can do what I hear it does, and you could even add a 2 or 3 percent performance bump. He said, the whole world is made out of water. And when you add a 2 or 3 percent efficiency with this technology tool at scale at scale to any number of other in the industries. At that time, I happened to have a dear brother as an engineer at Boeing. I had another brother that I had met at NAM, who was a PhD commander at Merrimar, which is where Top Gun, all that stuff is at. Super cool guy, still a brother, um, Ellis. And um and I just met uh a pilot. And it was so funny because I'd met these guys, they were all musicians, they were all into music, but they're all super high-level pilot, you know, like uh Apache or um Boeing test pilots, an engineer at Boeing, Ellis, and to me those were signs. Those were signs. I'm like aerospace, that's where we need to go because I find myself now surrounded with all these cats in aerospace, and it's exciting and cool. Okay, so I went back out to West Texas and uh bless my partners, you know. They said they understood. They knew how hard we were working and the momentum we had made, but they understood the argument, which is we need to find another place to play. And so we ended up developing uh what um would be considered an avionic suite, which is not more like a high voltage but a low voltage suite starting with 16 gauge, 18, 20, 22, and 24, right? Now this can deal with anything from core systems to comms and data. So it's got a nice breadth of function, right, from a frequency response standpoint. And we had found a lab in DC. There's like two labs, this one in the Navy has one, became friends with the pres the CEO of the lab, sent our first sample, and we got our test re test results back, and it was and it was really staggering. It was like, wow, now we're getting some test results where I don't have to like argue with some recording engineer at a cool studio who's who's looking at everything through an EE model because there's so much more involved in our electric universe than just electrons and how signal is moving. And and and more importantly, how human perception, how we're perceiving things. That's also a big part of our thing there is as well. And so now we have the data. It's like holy cow, that works. So then we came back with a full new suite with a new jacketing material, which is really phenomenal. And part of, I think, our performance um our high performance has also been in the mechanical and thermal practice. So in Anywhere in Wire you have basically three things to look at your geometry, the materials you're using, and the build methods. And from that, you want to look at your electrical performance, your mechanical performance, even on stage. If somebody steps on your mic cable and it becomes microphonic, that's mechanical. And or it gets too hot and fuses the conductors together, that's thermal. Right? All of those things are really critical when you're, you know, at 15,000 feet. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 36:27

Right, flying at Mach 5 or something ridiculous. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

That's it. That was the first kind of beginning on getting a bunch of guys together who knew what they were talking about to figure out what products we wanted to develop, where was there a massive piece in the market that we could insert ourselves into, and those gauges meet 80 to 90 percent of all requirements in avionics. Low voltage, which is everything we're hearing broadcast is low voltage, right? Um performance, why so many more things are going wireless. I think there is gonna be a heavy, heavy run on copper because of the lithium batteries and the battery leads that are gonna need to happen as the world shifts to more and more electrical craft, right? And so that's massive one-odd, you know, cable that just that you're getting into massive amounts of copper to manage the um power. And because of that, I think what's gonna happen is you're gonna see more and more wireless this, wireless that at high frequency, because it's gonna be easier to transmit high frequency, hence satellites and all this stuff. You can't you can't move power around the air. So um So that is that's kind of the long and short of of how it was. We just were at a gap in our in our movement in audio, and we needed to pivot, and it happened to be that those guys were in our orbit, and we ended up developing a suite, and the test results were pretty staggering, and that led to what happened a couple of months ago.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Aaron Powell Is it the same way for the aerospace guys to be like, oh, you work in music, that's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

Is that a You're so cool to touch on that, Patrick, and I appreciate it. I really do. I at first I was really paranoid to mix the two. And I I think I shared with you the other day, I was like, Oh, baby, it's chocolate and peanut butter here. That's right. It's Rocky Road. Well, it's it's like you know, two great things that go great together. For a long time, though, we were just cautious, you know, because we didn't have anything real. We didn't have any real activity, we didn't have the test results, we didn't have invitations to speak at aviation forums, and it wasn't and so we wanted to not um blur, it was hard enough getting people to, you know, eat the peanut butter alone without introducing anything else. And so we worked really hard to keep the two separated, but by by virtue of the real and organic things that have happened in the last six months, now it's authentic. And so and the guys, my Aerospace team would tell me the same thing that you're saying. They're just going, Dorish, don't it's not it's gonna be cool when you show up and you you're bringing, you know, John Mayer and all these rock stars to the table that are using your product on other projects, it's cool for them. It feels um authentic now, and it doesn't feel forced, and it and it's real because these things have happened. And so um so yeah, when I showed up in San Diego, um there were a lot of young students, you know, and and a few of them there knew that I made records and they were just like, wow, that's cool. So I think at this point, just kind of letting it happen, and if somebody doesn't get it, fuck them. Yes, fuck them. I don't know what else to say. I mean so it is what it is. Right on. But I didn't want it to be orchestrated. And he knows my heart. I don't want, I just don't, I I just need things to happen. And so it's been it's been cool. And it's cool that we're at that time. And again, I thank you because you encourage me to not be timid about about the the the crossover about sticking the chocolate in the peanut butter, you know. And it and it is cool. So thanks for encouraging that. All right. I mean it.

SPEAKER_02 40:29

Let's talk about cables just for a second. What makes AstroRope different than the competitors? Um, you know, because there's so many different cable makers out there that just say we have the best cable. Well, ours is the best cable. Ours is solderless, ours isn't, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so like how if you are a person that needs a an a con a cable to connect your instrument to an amplifier or uh your console to monitors or whatever, what is different? What's the main thing that people can take away from it?

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Well, there's three primary things, three primary ways you can affect the quality of a cable. One is its geometry, right? The the architecture of the cable itself. Ours is different. Okay. Specifically, super high strand. I'll even step back a little bit further. It's uh it's a conductive material. Not all copper is created equal. Right. As as as you point out.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

So you can have dirty copper and cleaner copper.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

What element in there, do you know? Lead makes it. Lead, it's called lead. So you're an electron and you're moving down the path and you're feeling cool, and it's like every time you come up to a piece of lead, you gotta step around it, arc around it, move around it, right? So a lead and lead, a dirty copper infused with a lot of lead is no bueno. There's ways to get the lead out.

unknown 41:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

You can get it out by electrolytically bathing it. Right. Some people use some other thermal practices that will pull the lead.

SPEAKER_04 41:57

That's what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

So that's what you want. You want super clean copper. We're able to one, the our original source of copper is the most coveted on the planet. Fortunately, our manufacturing partners have a nice contract for a very long time to make sure we're able to get that copper. So the copper's cleaner. There are many more strands in our conductors. The distance of those conductors from each other is so critical. I mean, it's so critical. It's the pace at which the wind in the copper per foot turns is so critical.

SPEAKER_02 42:38

Is is more better, or does it need to be more of a languid thing, like a lazy spaghetti wrapped around a pencil kind of thing?

SPEAKER_00 42:44

And that would depend on the gauge and the number of strands in the conductors, et cetera. So there are a lot of nuances. It's not like, hey man, can you get some of that seven, eight strand dirty copper and let's make a cable and sell it for 20 bucks, you know? Yeah. Don't tell music retailers that because they'll tell you that's how we feed our kids, is by selling lots and lots and lots and lots of cable. Our cables, guys, are sold with a lifetime warranty and a money-back guarantee. And there's not much more we can do to remove the barrier for you to have the opportunity to try it. Go buy one. In 17 years, I've had one returned. And I think because a kid's credit card got tapped or something like that. Wasn't that he didn't want to. And made in the USA. I think that's such a huge It is made, yeah. Huge differentiator. Absolutely it is.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

I remember having cables that after maybe twenty times plugging my guitar in, you start to see the copper getting rubbed off of it. Isn't that crazy? You start to see like uh aluminum underneath. Yeah. Where only the connector is just a little piece of wire connected to the cable on the inside, and none of it's really it's just like copper plated or something. Yeah, no.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

The the connectors are are a huge part of it. So So the quality of it, I'll start on the inside. And I'll just say this. We have done everything, everything we possibly can to reduce the noise bed from the inside out of the cable and from end to end. And from end to end. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 44:13

So you've done one, which was the quality of the cable on the strands. And then what are the other things?

SPEAKER_00 44:21

There are other dielectric materials. I mean, I can say this, I know this for a fact. We probably spend more to build a foot of wire than any of our competitors retail theirs for, okay? So because of the quality of the material, right? And it matters, right? You've heard it. It matters. Okay? So that's part of it. No doubt. So so the uh the quality of the copper, the geometry, fine, high-stranded, dielectric spacer material. You can use cheap dielectric spacer material, or you can use very high-quality dielectric spacer material, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Even the quality of the-fine that for someone like me.

SPEAKER_00 44:55

Yeah, dielectric is just like anything that is um going to preserve um the any crosstalk in an electromagnetic field, right? So it's it's um it insulation. It insulates, right? So so you've got um your high-stranded copper, you've got a um a very unique um insulation on the conductors that we use, that mob in sky blue, where you see the the wire. Very, very um unique properties there we're using. What's do you know what the number one dielectric is? Come on, Brian. You I don't buy that.

SPEAKER_01 45:33

The number one dialect plastic? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 45:36

The number one dielectric in the universe.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

The number one dielectric in the universe.

unknown 45:41

That's bad.

SPEAKER_01 45:42

The number one insulator?

SPEAKER_00 45:44

The number one dielectric in the universe is air.

SPEAKER_02 45:48

That's a trick question. Isn't that true? That is a trick question. I thought there was going to be no mass.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

No, well, okay, where water would be highly conductive, air is the most is the number one dielectric. Okay. Right? Isn't that fascinating? So there are things in the in our coating that make sure that even when the signal is moving through the wire, that the coating itself is a specific material that's getting it to perform better. Then you have dielectric, let's just say spacer tape. And you what you want to do is separate those conductors in their form because they're held together just perfectly. And most cables use a probably a 60 or 70 percent spiral shield. Well, every time a uh the shield bends, it's exposing the conductors because the spiral opens up, right? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

So let me let me relay that to guitar players who've probably never heard these words that you just uttered. Um which is uh spiral. So imagine you have like a ribbon and you're wrapping it around a uh a tube. Okay, the tube is this basically the wire, the copper wire.

SPEAKER_04 46:52

Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

But you're wrapping it around. Imagine the tube being flexible. So when you are on stage and your cable is bent in any way, whether it's you bending it by tucking it through back your strap and everything else, you're putting a bend in the cable, that little braid or of of flat ribbon uh insulator is now being bent and it opens the cable, the core of the cable up to having RF frequencies.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

That's exactly right. We use a 98% cross braided shield that looks more like a Chinese finger trap.

unknown 47:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

So that when you move around, what's it doing? It's better embracing and holding the integrity of the geometry of the conductors in place. Right? Yeah. So that's huge. Yeah. I'd say you know, and so um so then we we're at our shielding. The last material on our instrument cable would be the jacketing. And so you just want to have like a good high-pressurized, we're using a good PVC material that's super dense, um, still flexible. You want there to be a nice balance between flexibility and that it's supple to the touch, but that it's dense so that if a flight case or a, you know, a really cool dingo boot, you know, that some cool artist just crushed his thing, what happens is the shielding gets compromised and dented, and what once was a shield has now become an antenna. Right? Right. And then you're gonna get microphonics. So that's just in the build of the cable. Now let's move outside of that. What's next? Well, you gotta you have connectors, you have barrels, and you have solder. That's all that's left, right? Yeah. We use a what is absolutely the best connector in the world, designed by a brilliant brother, Paul has, who developed um his company was GH. And it is a patented solid core. I thought about having one in my pocket. It's a solid core um say that straight connector right over there. Every other cable out there that's not using this technology, think about that Glas Paul and that amp, and all that signal, and every other cable we played with in our lives before now, being reduced to a blob of ten. Right. Ten before the insulation plate. And then it goes into a piece of plastic. You know, yeah, you just reduced your signal down to ten. To ten. That connector is a two-inch copper rod that runs through the insulation plate to the tip of the connector. So we are literally soldering to inside the jack. Because that copper rod runs through the insulation plate. That's serious. That connector um is a is a part of our sound. And it's a cool part of our sound. Now, every other guitar cable out there, what screws on top of that connector? A barrel. Yeah. What's it made out of? Aluminum. Or some other garbage. Garbage. Some other high mass. Yeah, cheap pressed metal, yeah. And we talked about what being the best dielectric? Air. So when you bring in and introduce anything that's high mass, it's the opposite. You get my point? So mass, high mass is not good around electricity, you know, because of magnetism and it just gets it to misbehave. But in a but in a guitar barrel on a connector, there's a phenomenon called eddy current or looping. Right. Where the signal just gets up in there and just like spins off, you know, because of the magnetism, right? And it's just and what it's doing is it just clips the high frequencies really bad. So better copper, better geometry, better dielectric material, better uh material and coverage on the shielding, a better jacketing material, better connectors, non-metallic barrels. What do you use for those? The barrels? The barrels are a bit proprietary, but it's a non-metallic material that is solid enough and has the lowest potential for mass and eddy current, right?

SPEAKER_04 51:24

Right.

SPEAKER_00 51:24

And then um the last thing is the solder. And people are like, come on, do you the solder? I had Larry call me one night. We were talking about Larry Fishman, right? Larry calls me and I say, date, date, date. You know I love you. I'm like, I love you too, Larry. He's like, you know, when when when you told me that the solder you use matters, he said, I love you, but I thought you were crazy. And I said, Larry, man, I'm telling you what, you know, my patriarch shared with me, I won't use any other solder than that. He said, Dude, you're right. He said, I can hear a difference in the solder. Okay, yeah, you and Eric Johnson. You guys get it? On that directionality issue. I remember when Eric gave me a hug at NAM, he said, you were the only guy that ever acknowledged directionality. But the solder matters, and we use an uber, uber, uber pure lead-free silver solder. So again, if if tomorrow either one of you are like, Dar you I heard about this new solder, or I heard about this new material, or I heard about this new geometry, I will listen. And tomorrow, if I find out that there is something I have been remiss in including in our formula and in our build methods, I'll I'll explore it. But right now, I think we have done really everything we can within reason and resource to build the absolute best. Instrument cable, speaker cable, internal wiring, whatever it is, it's special. And and um as exhausting as the process of promoting and building and sharing all this is, man, I'll every now and then I'll get an awesome opportunity for uh an A-B session like we got to enjoy over at Oceanway. Same room Brian and I had had gone into when we were showing um one of the monitor cables, yeah. Yeah, and so um and you get to hear it and you get to see other people react, and we call it the wow factor. And I mean, honestly, unless somebody's just super cool, 99 out of 100 people, the minute you plug it in, say, Wow. Wow. And more than hearing it, the most sophisticated artists I know all say the same. I feel it. You can literally feel it. Now, this is an interesting phenomenon, guys. We all know our ears hear up to 20k-ish, right, before we get into puppy dog frequencies, right? So there is a study done by Bell Labs that was followed up by a major university in Japan. And I mean this was a 50-year study, guys, on human perception. And what they learned is that there is a phenomenon called hypersonics or psychoacoustics. And what they proved is that even though mechanically our ears are hearing to about 20 K, that our minds can perceive harmonics over 400K. That's amazing. This is stuff that's like hardwired into us genetically and physiologically from eons ago, probably as a survival technique, you know, so you could feel the bear step on a twig a quarter mile away, right? When even though your ears wouldn't hear it. So a lot of other ways that frequencies get into our body and our mind's process. It could be a mouth, vibrations in our chest. And so when you are getting all the mud out of the way and you're really preserving the integrity of that data pack, you feel it. And because because the because it's because the reproduced or amplified sound is is in phase. It has not been corrupted, it is not distorted. It's clean and it's there. And when it propagates in the room in phase electromagnetically being made out of water, we're you know, and responding electromagnetically, and we become really as one with the current and the frequency and the phase. And as esoteric as that sounds, Astarope just helps you raise your frequency, you know, and and um hopefully feel closer to your music and and more connected. And it's it's been it's a fun ride, and I'm interested to see, you know, when you guys are gonna start buying something.

SPEAKER_01 55:51

So that's what I was gonna ask you, Dariush.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

Is uh so where can people find you? Well, they can find us at astroope.com. We have some other partners out there. If you have a preferred, you know, big box dealer, go see them. But if not, we'd love you to come to astroope.com and we can answer any questions you have and meet all of your signal management solutions. And we'd be happy to help. I sure appreciate the opportunity. Hey, right on.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Well, I really appreciate your time and thank you for for coming on the show. Yeah, yeah. Very entertaining, very educational. There's and there's so much more to learn. I think again, uh it it was only a couple of months ago where I even knew that cables made a difference. So and it's made such a difference uh to me. So uh so thanks again for your time. Brian?

SPEAKER_02 56:38

Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, uh I would just say I just encourage people to just go experience it for yourself. Everybody can talk a good game and say what it means to them and how it changed their lives and you know, send shivers up their up their spine and the whole thing. But if if you just experience it for yourself, then you can make a really informed decision. I'm always a big fan of that.

SPEAKER_01 56:57

Yeah. So again, Astrope.com, Guitar Center, Sweetwater, Custom House. Uh but check out the website. That'll really give you an idea of what of what it looks like. So feel free to like, comment, subscribe, check out our previous episodes. We've got some really cool stuff out there uh so far, and um I appreciate everybody listening, tuning in, ear warm out, ear warm out.