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hi guys,
the Chinese are selling carbon fiber in teflon for little money; what about using that for audio? interconnects or power cords seem easy to do; perhaps some manufacturers of expensive audio cables are already using that? no solder i suppose, but you can weld or crimp... i'm tempted!... :)
best, paco
Follow Ups:
Paco, try using silver particle epoxy! I think this should work and I and a friend used this many years ago on CF wire and repairing CB tracks. We never needed to take it/them apart but it is probably/maybe a lifetime and once only connection!
thanks, but not familiar with that, so i'll prefer my usual WBT silver solder, which i already know and works fine to me
Can you solder carbon fiber with WBT silver solder?
sorry, i thought you was talking about my second project: Oyaide solid silver with KLE plugs; as for my first project, the CF one, i decided not to try... too difficult!... :)
this is HIGH RESISTANCE wire and not real suitable for audio use.
Too much is never enough
OK but don't tell me! tell Van den Hul, Audioquest, Xindac and Madscientistaudio; they have been making CF audio cables for may years....
What are the measureables of the cables you mention?
The cable the OP brought up is SPECIFICALLY made for heater uses. It gets WARM when you pass a current thru it. This is high resistance. Even the MadScientist folks talk about voltage loss, and this in a short digital cable.
Too much is never enough
The cable that Paco found has a resistance of 33 ohms per meter. That is not terribly high, and as I pointed out, has a small resistance compared to a typical line stage output impedance.
Anything with 33ohms resistance will get warm if you pass enough current through it. The number of Watts heating effect is easily found using ohm's law:
Power = Current * current * resistance
or
Power = (Voltage * Voltage) / Resistance
This cable is designed for mains voltage (eg 120V, 220V) to be applied over a length of 10meters or so.
Until someone tries this and reports back, estimates of sound quality are just guesses. My guess is that people who parade such guesses as hard fact should not be listened to.
Maybe beautox knows how to solder/terminate carbon fiber wire to its connection?Regardless of the output impedance, 33ohms/m seems very/extremely high to me. What would you consider to be high or very high resistance?
Edits: 11/14/16 11/14/16 11/14/16
"seems high" is a bit vague don't you think?
In fact it depends on the situation.
A typical line stage will usually have an output impedance of somewhere between a 100 and 1000 ohms. So you can think of it as being a voltage source with this resistance in series (ie in between). So adding 33 ohms of resistance makes little difference to the overall output impedance.
The destination input impedance will be much higher than this, usually from 10,000 to 100,000 ohms.
So in an interconnect system, 33ohms is insignificant. What matters is how well it works, how good it sounds. (In fact the original carbon IC, the Van Den Hul "The First" had a resistance around 300ohms)
Another situation : speaker cables. Well a 33ohm resistance is not going to be good here.. The output impedance of the preceding stage will be a fraction of an ohm typically, and the input impedance of the next stage usually 4 or 8 ohms, so in this situation, 33 ohms will swamp the other impedances.
beautox, can you tell paco and us how to solder/terminate carbon fiber wire to its connection point?Unfortunately I never really liked any of the Van Den Hul carbon fiber cables... 33ohms/m seems very/extremely high to me and 300ohms/m!!!
Also, I can't imagine that 1m of carbon fiber wire is as non-reactive as a 33ohm resistor!
Edits: 11/14/16 11/14/16 11/14/16
So, updating my previous calculation for the VdH cable, you can see that the gain loss is still negligible, a fraction of a dB. The whole point is that you are not transferring power so much as voltage in an interconnect, and voltage loss is a function of current. Not much current = not much voltage loss.
> I can't imagine that 1m of carbon fiber wire is as non-reactive as a 33ohm resistor!
Maybe you lack imagination! Or rather, technical knowledge (without which imagination can lead to imaginary results.) There are formulas that let you calculate the inductance and capacitance of wires, and these formulas do not depend on the wire's resistace.
I think a more valid comparison is a 1 metre length of normal wire. Look at it this way.. in a CF wire, the resistance will be much larger than the reactance, so the overall impedance will be largely real (ie resistive) . At the other extreme, a zero resistance wire would have a purely imaginary (reactive) impedance. A normal low resistace wire would be somewhere between the two, but likely closer to the latter.
Using as a SPEAKER wire will instantly destroy the damping factor.
Tube amps already have fairly low damping factor and with the right speaker you might be able to get away with it. Of course, you WILL suffer some power loss which is calculable.
As an interconnect? Sure, why not? But maybe not with a passive linestage where gain might be an issue.
Too much is never enough
Well yes, it's no good as a speaker wire. That was the point of the comparison..
With a passive linestage the output impedance will typically be a lot higher than an active linestage, so the CF resistance will be even more insignificant, so there's no reason to worry.
Gain loss is negligible in either case; (suggest learn some basic electronics..)
Let's assume some numbers that are the worst likely:
Output impedance : 50ohms
Input impedance : 10kohms
With a normal wire interconnect, a 1V signal from the line stage will produce 0.995025 volts at the input device (ie amp)
With the carbon fiber interconnect, the voltage will be 0.991768V
So the gain loss is roughly 0.028dB (compare to the roughly 1db-per-click on a typical volume control, that's 1/35th as much)
Van Den Hul The First : imho they sound like an old tube amp - lush midrange, tubby bass and rolled off top end. They do have a certain musicality though, but it's hard to get past the weaknesses.
'learned' a long time ago. No need to be snarky.
Have fun with your new wire.
Termination would appear the next hurdle. Did I read some suggestion of Silver conductive epoxy? Will that stick to Teflon? VDH doesn't sell bulk wire for this reason.
I think a DOPED (addition of a conductor, in this case) Carbon Fiber to lower resistance MIGHT be in order and make it useful as a speaker wire.
In the future, I'd be looking forward to GRAPHENE in a variety of applicaitons.
Too much is never enough
Silver conductive epoxy... that sounds interesting! Where can you get that from? I guess it must be quite common?
Why is graphene any different from carbon fibre? Why not simply use quality copper or silver wire?
We used it to 'bond' quartz tuning forks to the substrate. This was in the early 70's when I worked at STATEK, an originator of this style of quartz oscillator. Our bread-and-butter product was a watch crystal which oscillated at 32,768hz. = 2e15
You can get it on Amazon or even RadioShack these days. Ours came cold packed in styrofoam with dry ice.
My understanding of Graphene is that it is (potentially) a SHEET product of x number of atoms thickenss. It MIGHT be useful to make planar speakers like Magnepan or perhaps Electrostats.
Small size applications would be in headphones or tweeters. I'd even think a RIBBON Tweeter element could be fabricated.
This material should be 'doped' in specific patterns, so in the case of magnepan, for example, NO wire would have to be 'glued' to the surface to provide a conductor. This ultra-lightweight diaphragm in conjunction with Neo magnets would (or COULD) have pretty good sensitivity and power handling.
New, and currently only imaginary designs are possible, too, I suppose. STay Tuned!
Too much is never enough
Sounds really interesting!
I'm not current since the 'state-of-the-art' changes fairly quickly.
I'm not sure if ANY applications are out of the lab yet.
I'm hoping for a room temp superconductor. But CarbonFiber might be better. I'm thinking REAL high voltage lines for long distances. Current practice is to us Aluminum for weight savings over copper.
Link to some light reading.
Too much is never enough
I would imagine that as graphene or carbon fire gets warmer/hotter the resistance will dramatically vary and get higher (probably, which should be an interestingly unstable effect), whereas I believe when copper or silver get warmer/hotter the resistance gets lower (should be an interesting effect)?
Edits: 11/14/16
Why use imagination when you have Google?
Temp Coefficient Copper 0.00386, Silver 0.0038, Graphite -0.0005
So the sign is right, but the magnitude of carbon's temp change is one seventh of copper or silver, so not what I'd think of as dramatic. If you increase the temp of this carbon interconnect by 10C, the resistance will decrease by about 0.1 ohm
sorry, don't ask me; just ask the several manufacturers making high quality audiophile cables with carbon fiber; i already gave you their names...
Edits: 11/14/16
.
Resistance will be a much, much greater factor vs. metal conductors. You would also need to implement a non-solder termination method. I would not expect good audio from the experiment, so it's not advisable, IMO.
..just goes to show that resistance is not, in fact, a particularly important factor in line level interconnects. The reason is of course that a typical line level source has an output impedance usually from several tens of ohms to several hundred ohms.
This basically means it can be viewed as a voltage source with a series resistor (of the same value as the output impedance). So a little bit more resistance from an interconnect makes no difference.
Duster however is correct when he says you need a non-solder termination method. But from his pessimistic comment I suspect he's not tried either this experiment or any other CF interconnects.
Given how cheap the cost is, I'd say go for it. You might be surprised.
hey! you're the Madscientist in person!!
glad to see you here and thanks for your encouragement!!!
so, since you have a lot of expertise in soldering carbon fiber yourself,
what about giving me some hints? if that info is top secret you can always send
me a private email; promise to keep it secret!... :)
i was thinking of peeling a small peace of the end from teflon, then insert some sort
of copper coating, a small hood (like the ones i already saw in same power cords ends
before inserting them into the plugs screws), then soldering...
wadayathink?
Paco
My guess is that those wires will sound pretty sweet in the mids, have nice bass but likely be rolled off in the highs. I suspect that they will not be real tightly wound, and likely be pretty rough quality CF (I've not tried the ones you link to, but I've tried a lot of different types).
Doing the termination the by wrapping copper foil around and then compressing with a screw terminal will work reasonably well. But don't try soldering onto the copper - the heat from the soldering will easily damage the thin carbon fibers, so best to stick to screw termination when using this technique.
All I will say is that it took me a long time to find a way to terminate CF that is sonically transparent. But I think you will get pretty good results with this wire and technique, certainly for the cost. Do report back...
Both beautox and myself understand and clearly stated that carbon fiber as a material is not capable of a solder termination method. Your idea (as I understand it to be) about using a copper crimp sleeve before inserting the material into a set-screw connector slot would be a proper way to terminate a bundle of carbon fiber strands. But be aware that carbon fiber strands are toxic to breath, so wear a breathing mask while working with the material if you choose to use it for a DIY project.
I'm well aware of carbon fiber as a semiconductor, and its use for a limited amount of cable designs where the material is actually implemented as a primary/hybrid conductor for audio purposes. Resistance in terms of conductivity is a key factor regarding skin effect, and in this particular case it's important to note the way the carbon fibers are actually arranged within the stranded bundle of the non-audio product is an unknown factor. If carbon fiber as a primary conductor were a more promising material, cable designers/makers other than Van den Hul and scant others would opt for such as an effective primary conductor for audiophile purposes. I would rather be considered pessimistic in this case rather than be over-optimistic about the issue.
Duster, don't you think you might, just might, be a little dogmatic here?
Van den Hul is not at all the only manufacturer using carbon fiber for audiophile cables!
what about Stealthaudio, Audioquest, Xindak, and probably some others...
as for the Madscientist cables i read several very serious, prestigious reviews that
perhaps you should read as well to form a more balanced opinion; here are 2 of them:
http://www.monoandstereo.com/2016/03/madscientistaudio-hdc-digital-cable.html
http://www.monoandstereo.com/2016/09/mad-scientist-audio-heretical-plus.html
best, paco
Firstly, carbon is not what is normally thought of as a semiconductor.
Regarding skin effect: one of the big benfits of carbon is the skin effect, orlack thereof... the skin depth on carbon is huge, several inches at the top of the audio band. (Actually, the higher the resitivity of a material, the larger the skin depth). This actually means that silver has a smaller skin depth than copper, for example.
Skin depth in copper at 20khz is around 0.5mm so any conductor more than 1mm will notice the effect. With carbon fiber the depth at 20khz is several inches, much larger than any practical condutor.
But I wonder why you wade into debates like this where you are so clearly technically wrong, and lack experience. I could point you to reviews of carbon fiber cables where the reviewers were amazed but I doubt that would affect your clear bias in this case.
Surface resistance of a single conductor within a multi-stranded bundle affects cable resonances. Mitigation of any issue that contributes to conductor resonance is a key factor when choosing any cable for audio purposes.
> > Surface resistance of a single conductor within a multi-stranded bundle affects cable resonances.
Really? Where did you get that idea from? Unfortunately it does not make much sense...
Surface resistace? That's not a concept as such. Cable resonances? Do you mean mechanical or electrical? As far as I know this is BS so please provide some evidence like a link.
Let me now explain something that I think many folks misunderstand about skin effect. (Was that what you meant by 'surface resistance'?)
OK so if you have a multi strand conductor, it acts exactly like a solid core conductor for the purposes of skin effect. Even if the individual wires are INSULATED! (Before you scream Litz wire, hold on a sec).
The reason that skin effect acts like this is because it's an effect caused by fields - magnetic and electric fields due AC in the wires, so it does not care if the wire is multi or single stranded, or insulated..
So now, what about Litz wire? Isn't that individually stranded wires, all insulated? Well yes and no. Litz wire needs two things:
1) Individuially insulated strands
2) Special winding so that each strand spends equal amounts of time in the inside of the core, and on the outside. Only then is it proper Litz wire.
So you see, when talking about skin effect in multi-strand wire, the skin effect of a single conductor matters not at all. So that's why I call BS on your earlier statement. (Also because cables do not, on their own, resonate. They might as part of a system, but that has zilch to do with skin effect).
Back to carbon fiber - one big advantage I see if the lack of any skin effect in carbon conductors, and it doesn't matter if you are talking about a big carbon rod, or hundreds or thousands of tiny conductors making up a multi-strand wire. The reason for this is simply in the equations for skin depth - go calculate and you'll see I'm telling the truth.
Now one last thing I wanted to say to you Duster: I have personally tried many of your suggestions for cables, etc. I have to admit to being underwhelmed by most of them, but in particular by the interconnect suggestions I have heard. For example I have here sets of cables I made using VH-Audio Pulsar and V-Quad, both of which I find frankly boring and lacking in transparency and dynamics (there have been others that I have tried, but as I remember you stated that v-quad and v-twist were the among the best ICs you have heard).
So you see I have tried what you suggest, and have largely found it wanting. In comparison, I tried to contact you on more than one occasion to offer you interesting things to try, and you have never had the courtesy to even reply.
This is why I am less than impressed when you come barging into a thread spreading mis-information (eg implying that an increase in resistance will worsen skin effect, when in fact the precise opposite is the case). I do have at least the advantage of having spent many many hours working with carbon fibers.
If you like to know why there are not more audio cables made with them, I think it's more to do with their fragility, difficulty getting high quality fibers and the problems of termination rather than the fact they don't sound good.
The cost is minuscule. Why don't you purchase the 10 meters for $8.99, experiment and report back on your findings.
M
yep, i'll do! yet first i should solve the theoretical problem of soldering that bloody fiber...
..just wondering how they work.....carbon fiber is weaved plastic, and teflon keeps eggs from sticking..... Can the signal really be transferred well?
yep, it really works, as you can see in IC's (analog and digital) on the market by several reputed manufacturers;
Van den Hul, Stealth, Madscientist come to mind, but there are more;
my doubts are related to how the heck solder or crimp such fragile materials
It's interesting, but from all my experimental efforts in using everything from very cheap magnet wire to high-quality solid silver, interconnects made little, if any, difference in sound quality in my system.
Now when I experimented with upgrading the capacitors in my Maggies and an old McCormack amplifier, there were very noticeable sonic improvements.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Humility is the true mark of genius. Just get used to it."
-Anonymous
i've been experimenting a lot as well with IC's; finally i ended up by using
Jupiter solid copper wire in cotton, in teflon tubes for protection
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