Has anyone tried ICs made from Palladium or a Palladium alloy...RS Palladiums, or maybe Silversmith Palladium/Silver alloys, or maybe Aural Thrills???

Anyone with any experience with this metal I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks

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Well, Palladium is an actual metal and is proven to be more conductive than silver.

I have certainly heard the difference between the sound of copper and silver wire in interconnects.

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as opposed to what??

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since when??

g

I am surely no expert in electrical engineering so I am not looking to sound like a wise_ss, but I believe the conductivity of Palladium to be 94.8 mohms-cm and that of silver 630.51 mohm-cm.

It is my understanding that electrical conductivity is the reciprocal of electrical resistivity (ohms) (this I understand to be axiomatic rather than opinion).

In that case the conductivity of Palladium would be around .0105485 and the conductivity of Silver would be more on the order of .0015860

Since .015485 is a bit more than 9.75 times greater that .0015860 I just thought that Palladium is more conductive than Silver

Again, college was more than 25 years ago and even then I studied finance rather than engineering so I could easily be missing something.

Guzzler, since you seem more informed on this subject perhaps you could shed some light --- I know very little and was hoping somebody would share experiences if they had them.

Since you took the time to respond with questions you will hopefully share the reasons for you skepticism about the conductivity of Palladium vs Silver and correct my obviously pedestrian assumptions.

Again, Thanks

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Where did you get these numbers?

According to the Periodic Table program that I have, silver has a resistivity of 1.47mOhm/cm vs. palladium's 9.78mOhm/cm. (the actual numbers given are 14.7nOhm/m and 97.8nOhm/m, so I did a unit conversion)

By those figures, silver is more conductive (less resistive) than palladium.

The rationale for Palladium

1. Palladium is more expensive than silver
2. Palladium sounds more exotic than good ol' Argentum
3. Plenty of suckers can't tell the difference between bits of tin wire and VD nites but pretend they can

Makes for a great product in the audiophile market and lots of money for our friends at PS audio.

I wonder what superconductors sound like? Slap some RCA jacks on'em and find out!

Eric,

I got my numers from a google search for the periodic table - and it sounds like you looked in that direction yourself.

And again, I claim no real expertise, only a rudimentary grasp of the conversion process (which I could have done wrong, like I said it has been a long time but I thought a reciprocal meant that it was the x by which the known is mulitplied to equal 1).

As for the rest of the comments on this thread it seems largely a waste of bandwidth. I simply asked if anybody had heard interconnects made from this material. I have never heard any and I surely made no claims about how they sound.

From what I have read here at headfi many people ask if anyone has heard this or that piece of equipment so I really can't see what is so odd about my own inquiry.

Of course I guess it is equally common for people to make all kinds of comments about equipment they have never actually heard so it should come as no surprise.

I'd like to hear form somebody who has heard one of these interconnects, snake oil or not.

Thanks

Silver is the metal with best electrical conductivity, next is copper. Check your references:

http://web.mit.edu/3.091/www/pt/pert7.html
http://www.minerals.net/mineral/elem...ver/silver.htm
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Silver
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...elecon.html#c1
http://www.monroecc.edu/wusers/flanz...rElConduct.pdf


Convinced now?

PS. I've posted similar links like these before, it seems there is recurrent misinformation about this topic.

Oh Eric...this is the website where I got the conductivity numbers I used:

http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/silver.html
http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/palladium.html

But I just did a goodle search and have no particular experience with this site.

And my conversions were based upon the idea that since these numbers were stated in Ohms (electrical resistivity) - now here is where my college physics is pretty rusty - since conductivity is the reciprocal of resistivity one would take the values stated in the htmls above and devide each into 1 am I not correct?

Belive me, I have read your posts and know you build amplifiers and I am way over my head on this but in order to honestly answer the question posed by Guzzler: "Since when?" .....well, if my understanding of the equation is correct then since the elements began....but again I'd love to hear from someone more in the know. I was interested in how palladium ICs might sound given my assumptions (correct or not ) that they were more conductive than silver...now I am interested as well to know IF palladium is more conductive than silver.

Thanks rsaavedra...I wonder why different sites show differing values for this?

Notice that link you used has /~woods/ in it. Seems to be a set of personal pages. That person simply might have made a mistake when creating those pages.

Rules of thumb for online research: avoid personal and commercial sites/pages, especially when interested in factual information. Use authoritative/verifiable sources, and if possible, check for consistency from several such sources.

sorry to threadjack your discussion but what do palladium ics sound like then

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Yep. Your data was just wrong, that's all
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Well, I haven't built amplifiers in a long time. I do currently build (and sell) cables; in fact, I'm a Head-Fi sponsor. Check out the "Audiogeek" link at the top of the page.