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In Reply to: Re: silver-plated copper posted by Tom Dawson on February 1, 2005 at 09:38:33:
You may be right about polyurethane, but I may be wrong in saying that polyurethane is the coating on magnet wire. It's something made from petroleum, however. By all accounts, the magnet wire sounds excellent, but I have no experience with it.
Follow Ups:
You don't need to depend merely on my word - look up the electrical properties of polyurethane for yourself - they're mediocre on an audio quality scale and polyurethane is one of the more popular resins used for magnet wire.
I guess I did not make myself clear. I don't disagree with you at all. In fact, when I first heard that the wire is coated with a petroleum derivative, I was skeptical re its use. I am only saying that several DIYers have reported that magnet wire sounds excellent when used as chassis wire and so constitutes a very inexpensive and good choice. I speculate that the reason it may sound good IN SPITE of the polyurethane is that the coating is very thin.
My impression is also that the deleterious effect of mediocre insulation materials is minimized when buffered by a relatively large air gap. Probably the reason that round magnet wire air core inductors don't sound worse than they do are the unavoidable air gaps between turns.
Several years ago, I built a small 2-way speaker system using, in the xover, Solo foil wound inductors having polyester insulating tape (which is a better dielectric than polyurethane or nylon, but not nearly as good as, say polypropylene) and I was disappointed in the relatively strong negative effect the insulating tape had on the SQ (lacking air gaps - it hardly sounded better in this regard than round wire air core inductors). So, as soon as I could, I replaced them all with Goertz foil wound inductors which used polypropylene insulating tape, which sounded substantially smoother and more neutral than the Solos.
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