What is special about the Star 8 cable? I am asking as amateur who knows nothing about how cables might effect sound so forgive me if this is basic information.
The whole story:
A True-ribbon driver is almost a dead-short connection, it has only about 0.02-0.05 Ohms.
To be able to connect that to an amp without blowing it, you need to raise that to some impedance that amps can use, say 32 Ohms.
You use a transformer for that.
Transformer has a fixed transformation ratio and will multiply whatever impedance is at its secondary by a specific number.
With the best known method for reducing parasitic inductance, it has ~1uH of parasitic inductance in the secondary.
A headphone cable connects the transformer with the ribbon driver. It needs to have a certain, usable length, say 6ft.
At 6ft, with the best known but still practical method for reducing parasitic inductance of a cable at that length, we can reach down to 0.4uH.
Combined with the transformer's 1uH, that gives us the total of 1.4uH of parasitic inductance in the circuit.
To get a 30kHz of bandwidth with that inductance, the cable must have a resistance of 0.263 Ohms.
If it would have half as much resistance, like many headphone cables these days, the bandwidth would be 15kHz.
So, the chosen resistance for both cables we offer is ~ 0.25 Ohms.
Together with ribbon driver, that comes to be between 0.27 and 0.3 Ohms.
The transformer ratio is chosen to convert that to 32 (or 8) Ohms.
So, the cable that goes from Transformer Interface to ribbon headphones should have 0.25 Ohms and up to 0.8uH for the amp to see 32 Ohms at the transformer primary and that bandwidth doesn't drop to less than 25kHz.
Any cable manufacturer can make that if they wanted to. I have published those technical requirements before.
I don't know if anyone have met the requirements, or if they care, as they haven't published cable data.
STAR-8 and Satis are designed for a set of required specs and to my knowledge, we are the only ones that offer it with exact specs.
With STAR-8 we do annealing cycles of it after twisting, to make it sound good and smooth, yet detailed. This is related to mechanical behavior of wires under high currents in close vicinity to one another and how they attract and repel each other and if they will resonate if allowed to move...
Also, I never pleat wires of two channels together, so our cables don't have crosstalk. That clears up the midrange a lot.
So, it's a product of the necessity of driving the ribbons with normal headphone amps.
It belongs to a transformer-cable-ribbon system that is not free to play with, if you want to keep the specified impedance that the amps sees and high enough extension of highs.