FYI, here is an article from Absolute Sound regarding OCC (continuous cast copper) cable.
This might be of interest to you Ricky. FYI also, the Outlaw PCA cables are OCC copper.
http://www.everestaudio.com/harmonictech.pdf
Excerpts:
...I perceived gross profit margins and I came to believe that most reviewers were assigning undue importance to a component that does not exhibit the same range of variances as loudspeakers or amplifiers. I also believed that the cable industry had taken a fundamentally wrong turn in rejecting the one technology that might conceivably have yielded a quantifiably different behavior in a cable – single-crystal conductors, also called “continuously cast conductors.”
...Noel Lee of Monster Cable once told me that there are really only two aspects of making an audio cable – geometry and materials – that is, how you arrange and space the conductors, and what materials you use in the construction of the conductors and dielectric. (If this were the case, then a cable following some common geometry and employing conventional materials throughout should be entirely ordinary in performance, but that’s another discussion.) Lee further commented that most American cable manufacturers stress geometry rather than materials, and that he was of that school himself. He made these remarks in conjunction with Hitachi’s much-heralded introduction of single-crystal cables in 1984.
...working under technical director Richard Bell. Bell had designed particle accelerators for the Atomic Energy Commission and written several seminal papers on the distortion mechanisms of transistors while he was a research scientist at ITT. He was one of the most impressive people I’d ever met in the audio field, and, as it happened, he was an authority on single-crystal copper, having been hired at one time by Signet to research it. Bell wouldn’t talk much about the project, he’d signed a nondisclosure agreement, but he stated emphatically that it supported the audible and measurable superiority of single crystal.
... an old MIT publication on vacuum-tube design that single crystal was nothing new, and had been used in certain design applications for over 30 years.
...Ordinary conductive metals exhibit a crystalline internal structure with individual crystals of irregular size. The crystalline boundaries exhibit elastic effects in regard to electron motion, and electron collisions at these boundaries set up low audio-frequency resonances known as phonons, also referred to as “quantum noise,” though they are not noise in the sense of being random in nature. The intensity of phononic resonances is extremely low, but the argument is that it is sufficient to obscure low-level information in a recording or a transmission. Simply put, the fewer the number of crystalline boundaries to be traversed, the less noise; and single-crystal copper, with boundaries only at the surface of the wire, should produce less quantum noise than garden-variety high-purity copper or silver.
...appeared to provide significant audible benefits.
...the differences were particularly striking. With the Harmonics cables, the recording fairly sang. Instrumental forces were meticulously delineated, and at the same time, an unfailing sweetness and musicality was evident, plus a sense of reverberant tail-offs sauntering away into a diffuse performance space. Plug in the other wire, and the reproduction became remarkably sour and astringent, and I had a definite impression that the performance space itself puckered up, almost as if in response to the sourness.
...This is a wildly impressionistic account, but the usual High End vocabulary having to do with frequency balance, focus, dynamics, and what have you, simply doesn’t seem adequate.
...High-pitched instruments like bells and soprano recorders sounded much more extended, transients such as drum beats, seemed to have more impact even at lower volumes, let alone with levelmatched, and the timbres of the instruments are far less inclined to bleed into one another. And, yes, the soundstage was wider. It was almost like comparing a mediocre box speaker with lots of cabinet talk and average quality cones with a electrostat like the big Sound Lab.
...an extreme system capable of impressive performance with the cheapest cabling, but with the Harmonics in place, there was an almost surreal sense of palpability to good recordings – audience comments overheard on live sessions, leading edges of transients leaping out like leashed Dobermans, and highly realistic proportions to instruments.
...Each individual conductor is insulated with foamed polyethylene (PE) to reduce strand interaction, which greatly increases signal-to noise ratio and dynamic range. The dielectric constant of foamed PE is better than normal PE (2.3) because it has many man-made air pockets. This kind of dielectric is better than commonly used Teflon. Also, Teflon dielectric requires extraordinarily high temperatures during the cable-manufacturing process, which can destroy single-crystal cable.
