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Nope, silver sounds fine. (long)

Hi.

Take my words, silver sounds fine.

A properly built silver cable, interconnects or power cords, do not sound "bright, thin, sterile" at all. I DIY build, use & supply many min 4N pure silver cables & power cords to many audiophiles who all like them sonically.

Yes, silver needs breaking-in. Longer they are used, better they sound. This is my hands-on experience.

Last X-mas I rushed out an urgent DIY custom-built order of an audiophile acquaintance for a pair of 5ft 4N pure AG interconnects to meet its demanded deadline, I barely broke them in, only some 8 hours. Yet the pair sounded pretty acceptable, not "bright, thin. sterile" at all the very first time I test listened to it.

For all cables, cords & wires, I always carry out their conditioning & breaking-in process in my 'power cooker', which will provide thorough sped-up conditioning/breaking-in before use.

Here is what I always do to condition my cables & cords with my "power cooker" - a 50W stereo AM/FM transistor receiver, a vintage unit I picked up from a neightbourhood garage sales years back for a few bucks.

(1) selective frequency conditioning:
Install the pair the cable SIDE-BY-SIDE with the O/P end loaded with a dummy resistor load (8R, 10W), & the I/P end hooked up to the
speaker O/P terminals of the reciever. Then feed square wave signal signals from an audio signal generator into the cable under test through the receiver CD or any high level I/P. With digital meter set the voltage across the dummy load not over 1V for ICs & higher voltage & hence current, for speaker cable & power cables.

My way is to start with centre frequency for 2 hours & then change the test frequencies up & down per octave for same period of time each frequency w/i 20-20,000Hz audio spectrum. I use 261.63Hz as centre frequency to start (sorry, not 1KHz, 261.63Hz is middle C of musical instruments, only my personal choice).

(2) Wideband white noise breaking-in:

After this initial conditioning, I would use the inter-station FM white noise in the receiver as the test signal. With a frequency counter, you can locate the spot generating the white noise of the widest bandwith. I find the noises at far right end of the dial usually get widest bandwidth, up to over 20,000KHz.

So leave the cables 'cooked' up non-stop for a week or so, if time permits, with the voltage across the dummy load monitored from time to time.

This process should be done to any new cables, including commercial brandnames let alone homebrews.

If the cables come with shielding, make sure to cook them with
the shilding end as O/P end or follow the arrow marked on the jacket of any commercial products.

Here you go, my DIY silver cables never sound harsh at all (after proper seasoning as above). Likewise, my DIY silver plated OFHC pure copper cables.

Well, this my usual picky way of handling audio. Like my speaker systems, I make sure each speaker box is at equal distance to my ears (my designated listening position), measured from the tweeter -
+/- 1/4 inch variance between both stereo channels.

c-J



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