Some companies patent their secret sauce. To create narrow or broader protection, this secret must be spelled out in detail sufficient enough for either aim. To actuate protection means enforcement with potentially costly law suits should a first warning elicit no response. If, that is, the offender's country of operations is covered by the patent in the first place. Other companies prefer to avoid this can of wiggly worms. They don't talk secret sauce at all. They'd rather forego whatever bragging rights or perception advantages a patent or lots of tech talk might hold. Now industrious copy cats must reverse engineer from scratch. They have no easy list of ingredients and processes to look up in the patent registry or on the maker's website. Whatever special sauce the two Frenchmen Alain and Christophe of Absolue Créations cook into their cables remains a secret. Even what distinguishes their five ranges of analog signal and power cables on features, conductor count, geometry, layers, shields, materials and such is no longer spelled out as it once was on an earlier version of their website.


That something as seemingly mundane as cabling is far from 'patented out' is shown by Delphi Aerospace. They build cables for extraterrestrial mission-critical apps like satellites; and for infraterrestrial uses like the subterranean CERN Large Hadron collider in Geneva. They hold eight patents in the fields of reactance cancellation and noise reduction. Some of Delphi's noise reduction in cables "is achieved by the use of metal powders impregnated into the innermost shield" and a conductor alloy "made of rare earth and precious metals plus ceramic ingredients". Of course when you're selling hundreds of thousands of kilometers worth of wire to the military, NASA and government-funded research facilities, your resources are much grander than the typical boutique hifi outfit. For Absolue Créations, less chatter is better than verbal braggadocio and patents.