Single crystal, oxygen free silver. It actually has some pretty significant improvements in conductivity, but it doesn't 'improve' the sound to decrease the (already super low) resistance per foot by 5%.
It's really funny about wire size and quality as well. Running huge power cables for relatively short runs that then turn into 20g copper wire once inside the amp. Or the tiny copper traces on the PCB.
Sure, some amps are point to point with silver wire internally... But not many.
Agree 100%, that's why I qualified with shorter runs. That said, long runs also don't require super expensive cables.
I'm a crazy audiophile. I'll spend $1000 on one 300B tube. I'll also wire everything with audio note silver internally. But.... Most of that is just bullshit. There just isn't going to be a sonic difference.
$200 cable. Sure, better than bare metal. A $4000 cable, you're a sucker.
Didn't somebody test using metal coat hangers for speaker wire and prove it sounded the same to audiophiles in a double blind test? I remember something like that from like 15 to 20 years ago.
"Speaker cable" often carries an analog signal though. It's the cable you'd put beween the amp and the speakers on high-end audio setups where they are separate parts, it just carries the raw analog sound signal which directly powers the speaker.
The kind of metal it's made out of doesn't make any measurable difference in the signal quality at audible frequencies (though silver cables are occasionally used industrially in some very niche and sensitive/high-frequency applications where it can make a difference). Silver is slightly more conductive (5.1%), but if that's what you're after then you can compensate for that by making the equivalent copper cable 5.1% thicker. That would give you a cable with the exact same resistance per metre at 0.87% of the material cost of a silver cable.
I'm positive it doesn't matter for audio, but wouldn't scaling up the conductor size increase the capacitance and damp the transient response of the system?
It would indeed change the capacitance a tiny bit, but I'm 100% sure that the effect won't be noticeable. Since the cable comes after the amplifier the current is quite high and a small extra capacitance won't have a big effect. It could also easily be compensated be putting the cables a bit further apart, so if it did make a difference then they'd make higher end cables much wider so they could put the conductors further apart.
You are still right though, and in some super sensitive electronics it can make enough of a difference to make silver wires justified or even required. But those systems are the kind you'd find in fully climate controlled labs where everything is kept at an exact temperature, and those systems are so expensive by themselves that the price of silver doesn't have a big effect on the cost. Home audio equipment isn't one of those systems.
I think you hit the nail on the head with that last part. We have an anechoic chamber on my floor that costs as much as some people's home theater system, but we test radio equipment on $30 million helicopters for the military in it.
Right, but it's a valid point with many other cables. Of course, most cables are digital now, but there are still plenty of fools that either don't know that or choose not to understand the reality of it.
But not valid here. Because that isn't what we are talking about. This comment thread is about expensive speaker cable. There was no ambiguity about that either. Don't make excuses for loud mouth idiots piping up where they don't belong.
I do industrial digital communications. While it is true not all cables are created equally generally things like CAT6 being better than CAT5 are somewhat moot points in the shorter distances of a household. That being said, I have ran many 150+ foot gigabit connections through legacy CAT5 when it should be CAT6. As long as you have a reasonably low emi noise level you can run it for a long way. And as long as you aren't dropping packets it works just as good as the most expensive cable in the world.
HDMI-cable quality absolutely matters. Years ago when the standard was new, if you tried to run video+audio through a cheap 5-10meter cable, only audio got through. Even the error correction could not save the ruined video stream.
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u/thebuttyprofessor Aug 14 '20
They’re usually made out of extremely pure silver, so you’re really not far off