Here's an idea that apparently sounds a little off the wall..but he apparently had something.
The Cable Comparator System
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5740255-claims.html
Once upon a simpler time, wire was wire and cables were cables. While there were many industrial companies manufacturing wires and cables, these were essentially generic commodities distinguished primarily by conductor materials, gauge, strand topology, and insulation. In the late 1970s that began to change as recording engineers and audiophiles began to realize they needed to pay more attention to the quality and performance of their connections.
Although WireWorld was not founded until 1992, its origins date to 1978 when founder David Salz first became fascinated by the concept of dedicated audio cables. At that time, there were only a few high-end cables on the market, and Salz began building experimental cables by hand and comparing them to the production cables. The results of these initial experiments were inconclusive. Salz recognized that the cables sounded different, yet none of them sounded consistently better than the others in different systems.
"The most important lesson I learned from these comparisons was that changing cables did not tell me what they were doing to the sound," said Salz, "but this realization led me to an important discovery. The need for a reference connection."
In 1980 he made his first comparison of 1 meter long interconnects to a 2-inch long reference cable. The sound of this "cable bypass" was a revelation. Suddenly he could hear how much music was being lost in the cables and that everything sounded cleaner and more dynamic through the bypass. Next he built two-inch long cables with the various wires and plugs that he had on hand, and discovered that they all sounded nearly identical. Salz was amazed with these results because he knew this was the key to solving the problem of audio cable distortion.
Salz began a systematic investigation of the audible effects of cables. The bypass tests used to sort out these effects were generally awkward and difficult to produce, but their effectiveness was clearly superior to any other development technique. He found that there was a clear scientific explanation for the sound effects of cables; they actually relate directly to basic electrical filter theory. In 1981, Salz formulated a solution to the problem of audio cable distortion that was expressed in his original Symmetrical Coaxial cable design. He also founded his first cable company, Straightwire, Inc., that year.
The next step in his research involved a study of cable production technology. He began by finding the products most closely related to his designs. It turned out that an existing wire technology known as Litzendraht, used for high frequency coils, was similar to his proposed design. Salz located an old 'Litz' wire factory in Connecticut that was scheduled for closing. Not only did he purchase the machines, but he also arranged for instruction on their use by a plant engineer with decades of experience in producing the complex Litz wire constructions. This training proved to be extremely useful in the years that followed.
As company President and sole designer of the Straightwire cable line, Salz began producing cables in 1983. By 1985, his designs were widely regarded as the most neutral cables available in the world.
After producing four generations of critically acclaimed cables, Salz sold his interest in Straightwire at the end of 1991, and in January of 1992, he formed Wireworld. After a few months of intensive research, including detailed bypass testing, Salz developed several innovations which produced great improvements over earlier works. These innovations included Grain Optimized copper and solid silver conductors, proprietary connectors, as well as the patented optimization of his cable design concept, now called Symmetricoax™ (U.S. pat.#5,298,682). The first Wireworld cables were an instant success, earning Wireworld the reputation as a leader in the high-end audio cable industry.
Further research yielded a major breakthrough in late 1994, when Salz began working on a simple switching device to save time in testing cables. He soon realized that his switch could do much more than just saving time, and he expanded on this basic switching concept to create the first double-blind bypass testing system for audio cables, the Interconnect Comparator. The Cable Comparator concept was born, and Salz was able to demonstrate several working prototypes at the 1995 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
This was the first public demonstration of double-blind cable bypass testing that we know of. For the first time in history, Salz proved that cable distortion was audible under double-blind test conditions.
Since its introduction in 1995, the Wireworld Interconnect Comparator has provided the only scientific proof of the audibility and value of high-end audio cables. It received the Innovations '96 award and received numerous reviews and enthusiastic endorsements from respected audio critics around the world. The original Interconnect Comparator is operated manually, and is limited to comparing a single pair of cables to a bypass or one pair of cables to another. In 1998, Wireworld introduced The Cable Comparator System, which extends the concept of the original device to provide a complete testing facility for cables.
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