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12.11.183.254
my friend and i are going to rewire my rega OEM1 tonearm. it will be staying on my NAD533 with a P3 glass platter.anyway, i am not sure if i should use the cardas tonearm wire or pure silver wire? currently i am using a grado red cartridge which i plan to keep and eventually upgrade to a grado wood, and an HH scott 340B receiver (also its phono stage).
what would be the benfits of one or the other? any opinions would be welcomed.
thanks,
mike
Follow Ups:
When you say silver that doesn't tell much about the actual physical wire other than there is some silver in it somewhere.The most commonly used silver wires for DYI (do yourself in!) rewiring is some sort of solidcore telfon coated silver. Most are too stiff and if it is fine enough, about 34-36awg, so it won't influence the free movement of the tonearm it is so fine as to be very fragile, hard to strip and solder and frankly from lots of research won't sound any better than the Cardas if even as good.
Silver is not the magic sounding material it is so often made out to be.
in the systems that I have tried it in. I have used a couple of copper/silver hybrid cables that were nice, but still they were better in some systems than others. I have forever banished silver from my system and other than for plating and as an alloy in solder, from my shop as well. It just sounds bad and costs more!
-Bill
What exactly is Cardas wire?IE what gauge, and what is the construction.
I was of the impression that Cardas wire comprised strands of high purity copper wire which are individually silver plated and individually coated with some sort of insulating material.
Best regards,
BK
Thanks guys NT
"What exactly is Cardas wire?"A wire made by a guy named Cardas.?? :-)
Seriously, it is a real Litz wire made up of six pure copper stands with a thin polyurathane insulation coating. Those total the 33awg which has a resistance of 0.6 ohms/meter. If they were all the same gauge then they would be 41awg each.
BUT ... one of the strands appears to be a smaller diameter and has a slightly different color urathane than the other 5. If the normally used by Cardas "Golden Ratio" were applied here somewhere then perhaps, just perhaps, the one strand could be 42awg and the other 5 40 awg which also yields 33awg, or 33.5. The golden ratio is 0.625 to 1 so it would fit. Who knows.
The outside coating holding the strands together is a very flexible polyurathane coating.
Cheers!
I have a fair amount of Cardas wire I got from Welborne Labs (great pricing) I'm pretty certain it's not silver tinned or coated, just high quality Copper.
Cardas wire has become somewhat of a Standard as it has a great reputation for being as good as it really ever needs to be without the Hype and Snake oil marketing you see with some of the outrageously priced wire.
Garth In full agreement there, it's more about assumption or idea
of silver as a precious metal so it must be better, I think some of the silver tinned or silver coated copper is quite flawed as apparently there is no way to have a uniform deposition and the results are often audible.I have a friend who buys into a lot of the crap, he used Gold wire for wiring loudspeaker internals, costs a small fortune and Gold isn't even as good a conductor as Aluminum, and the small lengths used of wire as speaker internal wiring seems reletively meaningless
to me, much more about perception and assumption and psychoacoustics.Regards FredJ
On a high school science table, you are correct. (Interestingly enough, facility of transmission also works for heat . . . copper pots I got, silver is a bit too far for me).Now for the problems with such a simplistic approach.
- Though gold does not oxidize it does form (very slowly) sulfides.
- Silver also does not oxidize. Silver tarnish is a sulfide and it forms much more rapidly than gold.
- Copper, on the other hand, oxidizes.
- Both gold sulfide and silver sulfide are not as good in conductance as the native material but they are both far better than copper oxide, which also forms very rapidly on bare wire.
- It has been long established that native conductivity has less effect on the performance of interconnects than the implications of the posts here indicate. No one has ever done a scentific study of the effects on tonearm cable which carries far weaker signals than an interconnect.
- Garth has an excellent point, Cardas wire properly soldered and joined is very good and likely better than the wire in most arms. It is also likely better than most of the DYI (sic) choices.
- However, my experiments and tests indicate that there is something to be said for other choices, provided thay are flexible enough and properly installed.
A Quick summary:
"OFC" copper Is available in extremely thin gauges coated in a variety of insulators some of which may be suitable for any tonearm. It shares many of the qualities of the Cardas wire but on a system with extremely great micro detail should sound slightly "more precise" whilst retaining the "warmth" that lovers of copper swear by.
Silver has a reputation of sounding "precise", "etched" or "bright" though extremely quiet. There may be a reason. Jena White-Wolf Crock of Jena Labs maintains that a "hash" can be seen on silver transmitting low level AC signals (and these are AC signals). However, Lloyd Walker is a flaming silver devotee. Both are, BTW, huge supporters of true deep immersion cryo treatment.
Gold is the most stable of these materials. It is also the most ductile and can yield wire of extremely thin gauge without voids far more easily than the others. Jena Crock and Lloyd Walker both eschew gold. The characteristic sound is "organic" or "natural".I considered producing a new servo-tangential tonearm for a while and tried all of these choices. I decided that, synergies being what they are, all should be made available. For myself, I use a gold plated gold-silver-copper alloy wound in silk (custom done for me). In my system, in my room and to my ears it sounds best. But the difference isn't huge. And frankly, if I could not have this wire the Cardas might well be my choice with the current system.
So, in my system, it would go
Alloy
Cardas
Gold
Copper
SilverYou will notice that the best conductor is last. I am sure Lloyd will send me a nasty email.
Most importantly, however, one must eliminate solder joints and RCA connectors where one can. Cartridge pins are cool, but if one has a single strand it may be fastened to the cartridge pin with a bit of teflon tape (or conductive copper or silver tape).
Simply put, direct wiring still holds an advantage, though Lloyd Walker's Silver Treatment for RCAs is stunningly good. I, and many others whom I respect, swear by the stuff.
John, thanks for the link below on the metals.Since we are talking here about tonearm wire and since most of the silver used is solidcore wth teflon it is necessary to use a much smaller gauge than say the 33awg Cardas Litz wire. From experience one must use about 36-38awg solid silver to gt enough flexibility for use in a tonearm.
33awg copper has a resistance of 0.676 ohms/meter. To compensate for the better resistivity of silver add say 6-7% or let's say 0.723ohms. That is "just" 34awg of copper. 38awg copper is 2.19 ohms/meter so silver would be about 2.05 ohms/meter. 36awg silver is 1.22ohms.
So in general if it makes a difference, the resistance that is, a suitable (from a mechanical point of view) siler would be 2 to 3 times the resistivity of the 33awg Cardas litz wire.
And I personally have not been able to hear the "magic" of silver in trials using the same gauge silver, silver plated copper, tin plated copper, tin plated silver and pure copper. These were all 30awg used as interconnects.
Cheers!
Did you hear any difference between any of them? What was the geometry of the interconnects?Thanks in advace!
Dave
They were all 100% identical in cnstruction, only the conductor material listed was different.The differences were very slight and surprisingly (but maybe not) the tin plated copper and tin plated silvr and silver plated copper were better by a slight margin than the pure copper and silver. There is a theory that bimetal conductors with the "less better" material on the outside is a more natural sounding conductor.
...that turntables, tonearms and cartridges make the difference—not wires.What can I say? It’s just as I expected.
Best regards,
John Elison
You can conclude from what I said above that silver does not necessarily sound better or different from some other material "all else being equal". This I also pointed out.HOW a given conductor material is applied DOES make a difference, especially in a tonearm. Is it too stiff, is is shielded or not, how is the shield grunded, is the shield and/or ground in the signal path of the cartridge, is/are the "wire(s)" connected to the cartridge in a symmetrical pattern? And there are other considerations.
A stranded wire regardless of conductor material will sound different (red worse) than a litz wire of the same gauge.
But you are right simply using "silver" something or other just because silver has 5-6% better conductivity than copper is meaningless and probably reveals noting about the results.
Cheers!
JohnThat's exactly what I'd assumed but according to both a chart and an electrical engineer friend Gold is not great shakes as a conductor, perhaps it is great based on different criteria ?
I think Conductivity was the chart I read ?
Take a look at the chart in the link below. Silver (Ag) is the very best conductor and Copper (Cu) is very close to silver, conducting about 95% as well. Gold (Au) is the third best, conducting about 73% as well as silver. Then comes Aluminum (Al) in forth place conducting about 59% as well as silver.Gold happens to be the best conductor that does not oxidize or tarnish. Therefore, it is used for switch contacts, connector contacts, or other applications exposed to the atmosphere. Copper and Silver must be coated or insulated to protect them from the atmosphere.
Best regards,
John Elison
I had the name wrong, it is the VINYL LEXIKON by Frank Wonneberg ISBN 3-89602-226-1.Amazon.de has it but unfortunately amazon.com does not.
435 pages of information on everything vinyl. If it isn't in this book you don't need to know! :-)
Cheers!
GarthThanks for remembering and taking the time, muy appreciato
I'm on a quest for this book now !Regards Fred
i read through the archives and it seemed that the silver wire was at worst a giant pain in the ass and at best no better than the cardas tonearm wire. i have already ordered everything to rewire with the cardas.
Can't speak to the silver wire, but i really like my Cardas wired RB300 with Denon MC. On a Planar 3. The Cardas cartridge clips are very nice.
HenryNecessity is a mother . . .
thanks henry,i did some digging in the archives and have gone with the 33awg cardas wire.
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