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In Reply to: Why is Siltech the only line with a gold-silver conductor? posted by Tekunda on November 13, 2001 at 18:52:58:
I recently purchased pure "fine" silver wire from a wire manufacturer in 16 ga. and 20 ga. and correspondingly sized tubing from McMaster Carr to bi-wire my speakers. Single strands of the 16 ga. for the bottom-end and single strands of the 20 ga. for the ribbons.Just yesterday I received my latest review of Stereophile. There is a rather long article on the principle of cable design. The gist of the article (as I humbly understand it) is that cable design and/or choice of wire makes very little difference in the quality of truly "accurate" sound reproduction. The real difference is to be found in the impedance of the output (i.e. CDP), the "impedance of the cable" and the impedance of the input (i.e. pre-amp).
This article makes perfect sense and exposes the whole cable industry scam (IMHO). Simply put, different cables have different impedances and therefore sound different. The article states that virtually any cable could be matched to the impedance of the source and the downline input. Think about it, resistors and caps can both be used to alter the "signal" in any other piece of electronic gear (amps, preamps, cdp, speakers) and in doing so, they alter the sound. Some cables may indeed sound better than others, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are more accurate. But hey, if inaccurate or colored cables sound better to ya, then who am I to criticize.
Since every cable has its own impedance, it therefore imparts its own sound as well. For ultimate neutrality, cable manufacturers should simply be using any good quality wire (any wire!) and custom manufacture the impedance to match that of the individual's system. Unless, however, one "chooses" to intentionally change the impedance of the cable to alter the sound from total neutrality to something that simply sounds more appealing, accurate or not.
The next great cable company to emerge may very well be the one that manufactures custom cables on an idividual basis for all of us Joe Schmoes . This is not rocket science that we are talking about here. It is simply resistors used to match impedance. Cables would be sold at a fraction of the price that they are now and probably be far more accurate.
BTW, the silver cables that I made sounded better than my Audioquest cables within two hours of burn-in. With an additional three days of burn-in, they have all the bottom-end weight of the AQ, a beautiful mid-range and a very detailed high-end without being the least bit bright. All of the naysayers criticizing silver wire (bright, lean mid-range and bottom-end) were just plain wrong as it relates to "my" system and "my" ears. The silvers are much smoother and more musical without sacrificing anything to the AQ. Bare in mind, I am not saying the AQ cables are bad, they just simply aren't as good as my home-made $100 silver cables made from single strands.
What's the reason for this? For one, silver is simply a better conductor than copper and I suspect that the silver cables may simply match the impedances in my system a little better. When I have time, I am going to match the impedances of my system per the Stereophile article and see how they sound. Who knows, I may not like them as much! Maybe a little color is not a bad thing.
Having said that though, my goal is to reproduce the signal as accurately as possible and if the sound doesn't seem as good, I will try to re-educate my ears to prefer the accurate sound. I guess it could be akin to the ole saying of "having to acquire a taste for beer".
FWIW, I got the silver cable idea from:http://www.laventure.net/tourist/cables.htm
(One note, I called "six" different wire companies that manufacture silver wire. They all said that 99.9% pure is the highest purity that they manufacture. I have also read that the techology doesn't exist yet to make better than 99.99% pure silver wire. Therefore:
I am very skeptical of companies that say they offer 5N or 6N pure silver wire. Hey, who's going to check them, right! Not me....and probably not you. I suspect that they are counting on that. They are probably willing to take the chance that none of us will be sending the cables that we buy out for purity testing. I guess they assume it would be rather simple to plead "mea culpa"....."Oh, it must have been a typo!")
Thad
Follow Ups:
I believe you are taking the Stereophile article too seriously and drawing the wrong conclusions.This method works well for very high-frequency signals, but can be overkill for audio signals. In fact, I can design for you a cable/system that is perfectly matched, so no reflections (echoes) will occur, and yet this system will sound abysmal for an audio system. The reason is that the lumped parameters are actually more important than the distributed paramters in the audio band.
Since the characteristic impedance is sqrt(L/C), this means that L and C can be as high as I want and still match the impedance of the line and load. This is obviously not a good idea, since at audio frequencies, the capacitance of the entire line is seen by the driver.
I would agree that if you built a low-capacitance, low-inductance cable and THEN matched the line and load impedances to that, then you would indeed have avery high-bandwidth cable suitable for audio that will not exhibit HF reflections.
;-D
If this is true what Stereophile and you state, then even the Valhalla should sound terrible in many systems, if there is a great impedance mismatch with the particular system. But how come then, just from a logical standpoint, that most people believe that this cable is very good to say at least.
I seriously doubt that all people, who believe the Valhalla to perform extraordinary in their systems, have a system with equal impedance.
Or why not just measeure the impedance of the Valhalla, make a cable with the same impendance and here you have a cable with the same performance for a fraction of the price.
If it were so easy, let's do it then. I am sure, that if you say you can match your DIY cable to the impendance of your system, you have the knowledge to make a cable with the same impendance as the Valhalla and you could tell us all, how such a cable performes in your system. (This is in no way meant cynical, I am really curious if you couldn't make such a cable and tell us what happened.)
Tekunda - these are not mutually exclusive. In other words, a particular interconnect may be improved by terminating to eliminate reflections, however, to make a good-sounding cable, you don't need to eliminate reflections by terminating in the characteristic impedance.
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