The Mysterious Box Of The MIT Cable MITerminator 5

I remember when the first time look at the MIT cable advertisement in Stereophile magazine, it was at mid 90's. The mysterious box is in line with the cables makes me curious about what the purpose is the box. I believe it should be some magic or the top secret tuning from the MIT company. Then, many years passes by and today I have a chance to see what is inside it.

Today experiment would be the MITerminator 5. It is not the top of the line speaker cables, but I believe the general principal should be the same with their other cables line-up. The thickness of this cable is around 18 mm and it is grey. Look dirty and old by time.

This MITerminator 5 has the innovative design. The plugs can swap either with the banana plugs or spades. This feature is very useful and made the installation more practical to any equipment.

Enough talking, lets see what inside (drum rolling!)

It is very easy to open up the box due to the aging of the plastic itself. This plastic material use in this cable can't withstand for long period of time. It is like a cracker, easy to break. And inside you will notice a glue cover everything inside.

Tadaaa... a small inductor inside! Not the neat design inside in my opinion.

I will going deeper with it and lets see what configuration they made. I detach the wiring from the inductor for better inspection. This thick jacket cables comes with some small cables inside.

Looking to the inductor, it is around 0.2 mH and it has the iron core. This is sure for LPF, but for what? As I know the inductor will effect to the cutting of sound stage and high frequency. It is common for the LPF cross-over circuit but not full-range.

In detail, inside of this thick cable jacket are nylon, then I found four cables consist of pair of 18 AWG and pair of 22 AWG. They are parallel on both polarity just like bi-wiring speaker system. One small wire with one big wire for a polarity, and vice versa.

Inside the box, the positive polarity of the 22 AWG wire is cut and connect to the inductor. This principle remind me to baffle step compensation circuit which the cables act as a resistor. This will result in better bass control without degrade the mid to high frequency.

At the end, I could say that this is a clever configuration from MIT design. They tuned the sound EQ inside the cables. Of course, with this configuration, not every system could get the benefit from it and for others, it will make the sound colored. If you're wondering on how this cable schematic is, herewith I try to figure it by the drawing.

Updates
I do some analysis on the coil of this MITerminator 5 speaker cable. You can get the full information about it here.

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