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I guess Kharma does the same, but is outrageously expensive as well.
After doing my little cable shoot-out here I just wonder, why not more companies would experiment with a gold-silver alloy like Siltech?
It cannot be the price of gold, can it? One gram of 24kt gold is about $12, so even if a company would use a whole ounce of gold per pair of interconnetcs, we still are not talking more than $400 of pure material costs.
Imagine a company getting this right like Siltech, but only charging a third of the price. I can see this company selling huge quantities of cable.
Now I think, that the cable manufacturers have not waited for a guy from Germany to suggest such a thing, so there must be a few obvious reasons, why only Siltech does use gold, which I have clearly overlooked.
Maybe the more technical savvy people here can answer such a question.
Follow Ups:
coming out with a G5 speaker cable (which I probably will buy) at around the same price as their current Grand Refernce speaker cable (G4) areound $7K for 2M. While still epensive, that is a third the cost of the Siltech The Emperor!
Tekunda, Now how about a Digital Cable shootout!? PAD Dominus vs Siltech Golden Eagle (price?) vs Tara Labs the One! That would help me out a lot, LOL!
Does the new US importer of Kharma have a webpage?
not that I know of.
The signal that you hear at the end of the cable is not the result of the electron you pumped into the other end of the cable traveling to the other end, but the field generated the pure fact of pumping electrons in, and the field traveling down the length of the cable. The sound of a particular cable has a lot more to do with its geometry, the insulators used, and the metal to metal junctions on the gross level. Now that is not to say that at the extremes crystal to crystal junctions do not count but one can only safely evaluate those if one makes the same cable out of different conductors. So it might be safe to say if the siltech cable was made out of copper it would sound less good than it was made out of silver/gold.
dee
;-D
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
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.
Empirical Audio has done some gold-plated cables, but we are still testing the effect on sound. We have two types of corrosion inhibitors that we are evaluating, chemical and gold-plating.We have used non-treated cables for 5-7 years with no apparent change.
I've heard the Siltech sales manager say that they use gold to prevent the degradation from eventual oxidation/corrosion you get with most other cables. In other words, their position is that other cables don't maintain their performance over time, and Siltech takes the position that their cables will not degrade over time.I heard this statement two weeks ago in a consumer seminar we participated in at Celestial Sound in Evanston, IL.
Since I don't have Siltech cables, guess I have to assume that these guys have run exhaustive tests to determine the efficacy of their designs.
OTH - you could replace cables that oxidized after a few years and still perhaps not pay as much as the Siltech, a question to consider if you were buying the Siltechs primarily for their long term consistency.
Best regards,Jim Smith
Actually, the reason for starting this thread was to suggest if not another manufacturer could experiment with such a conductor and come out with a cheaper gold-silver line?
I am sure that Siltech has its good reasons for using gold-silver in its cables, so my BIG question:Why has nobody else tried to develop such a conductor, if the sound of Siltech is so gorgeous?
As I said in my earlier post, it cannot be the price of gold. $12 per gram is not so bad.
I read that Silversmith will come out with a Palladium conductor, which is nothing more what some people have in their teeth fillings or crowns: Platinum, gold and I guess mercury (some people will know better) So I hope that more manufacturers will start to experiment with gold in their conductors, when Siltech has such a good sounding cable. I know it takes more than just mixing gold and silver, or maybe not?
We will never know, as long as nobody but Siltech is doing this.
If I had the time and knowledge I would start to experiment with gold-silver or platinum-palladium-silver alloys.
Hmmm... I guess It's all about costs. But manufacturers surely will make them (gold, platinum or otherwise) if they think that there'll be buyers.
We don't know yet whether the improvement in sound is due to the gold or just a superior geometry and silver purity etc..It is very likely that the gold-plating is not the reason. Just as the effect of silver-plated copper is not significant.
We don't know yet whether the improvement in sound is due to the gold or just a superior geometry and silver purity etc..It is very likely that the gold-plating is not the reason. Just as the effect of silver-plated copper is not significant.
Copper has a conductivity of about 100, silver is around 106 and gold is 67 or so. Correct me if my numbers are wrong but i do believe that they are in the right ballpark. The only advantage i can see in using gold is that it is chemically inert, and has a crystal structure that is more suited for very thin wires thus making very light wire assemblies possible (Like the Clearaudio Insider Gold coils) You can get 4N gold wire from A-M systems for about $120 for 25 feet of 40Ga un-insulated wire. which is about three times the price of the silver wire. One of these days when i have nothing else to do i may try it as ChrisVH mentions it.
dee
;-D
The reason why gold is used only as plugs because it does not corrode, unlike copper or silver. Using it as a cable is not recommended because of its low conductivity.
Well I do not get it, I guess. The Siltech G5 is one of the best cables I ever heard, but its a gold-silver alloy and here are two people telling me that the use of gold is not recommended.
Have the people not read my post I wonder?
I was not speaking about pure gold, but an silver-gold alloy like Siltech uses.
I guess they have found that an alloy containing gold does just the opposite what people claim here: it is not degrading the sound, but improving it!!
If siltech uses a silver-gold combination, then I guess they made use of the gold as a corrosion-preventive material. Correct me if I'm wrong here - my comment was based on studies and technical papers I've read on using gold, silver and copper.Have you tried comparing the Siltech with another silver only conductor interconnect?
Yes, many of the cables I tried were silver only. Like the Acoustic Zen.
Is it? This is not a universal opinion. Gold cladding, Cryo, and super pure wire does not always make the best cable. Transparent uses copper, now what?
I never wanted to suggest of course that Siltech has the best cable out there. It is very good and from what I just read about the Transparent Opus, it seems not to justify the price tag.
Yes, copper makes an excellent conductor also, I enjoy the copper Sahauro cables very much.
According to Siltech, although gold has a lower conductive value than
silver, it has the ability to reduce what Siltech calls micro level
distortion. Therefor by filling gold at an atomic level in a silver
conductor, they are able to combine the strengths of these two
metals.
nt
Tekunda--Purist Audio also uses such alloys. If you get the chance, you should try and listen to Dominus as well as the other cables you've auditioned, it would be an interesting comparison. Though all insanely priced--agreed.
By the way, I believe Kharma cables are actually made for them by Siltech ;-)
nt
I heard some really negative stuff about the Dominus, that it is very grainy, now you say the Valhalla is better.
Or did you want to suggest that the Dominus is the superior cable?
(Might be my English)Have you tried the Dominus with the RLS upgrade?
My experience is with the first Dominus cables only. While it was initially very impressive, the Omega Mikros which replaced them were guite superior. Since then, however, I have moved on to others.
Alloys are different than plating. Who uses plating and who does alloys?
I have read somewhere that Kharma now manufactures their own cables.
It might be that the conductors are still made by Siltech.
I think they both buy the internal wire from the same source, Siltech doesn't make it themselves. Previously I think Sitech sold some of their stock to Kharma.
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