good interconnect wire?

[pne]

My dad picked up some wire from work, and I was wondering if it was good stuff to make interconnects out of. He claims it is pure silver wire and was very hard to get. It looks to be about 16-17 gauge, solid, and very stiff. Any comments? I heard gold/silver is one of the best materials to make speaker wire out of because they don't oxidize and are the best metal conductors.

 

[bg4533]

Silver tends to be pretty bright, but with the right system it can sound great. The thickness of your wire will be a bit too much for most plugs, but if you can find some it will fit it should work well. Also, if it is stiff it will only work for things like RCA cables that won't be moved much. Don't plan on making cables for portables or anything like that.

 

[Syzygies]

I've heard this many times. Does silver actually test bright? Can anyone give an equivalent circuit for silver wire, explaining why it is bright? Or is this all in the departure from linearity? There must have been explanations offered for this, over the years...

 

[HiGHFLYiN9]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pne My dad picked up some wire from work, and I was wondering if it was good stuff to make interconnects out of. He claims it is pure silver wire and was very hard to get. It looks to be about 16-17 gauge, solid, and very stiff. Any comments? I heard gold/silver is one of the best materials to make speaker wire out of because they don't oxidize and are the best metal conductors.

Silver will oxidize like copper however the oxidation is still conductive, copper oxidation is a poor conductor. Gold isn't as conductive as silver or copper so it is generally mixed with a combination of one or both and I have read it produces a warmer sound. 16-17 gauge is a little large for ICs but would work well for speaker cable, especially using more than one run if you can afford to. I personally prefer silver over copper with interconnects, however my speaker cables are silver plated copper so I cannot comment on how they might sound (I have looked into silver speaker cables but I could not justify the cost of materials to put a pair together). Good luck, have fun, and be sure to post some pics when you're done in the DIY cable gallery (links in my sig).

 

[drewd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Syzygies I've heard this many times. Does silver actually test bright? Can anyone give an equivalent circuit for silver wire, explaining why it is bright? Or is this all in the departure from linearity? There must have been explanations offered for this, over the years...

I'm not going to jump into the silver versus copper debate because, quite frankly, I can't hear a difference. But there is a physical difference - if nothing else, the silver wire is a better conductor than copper, for a given wire thickness. You can model the circuit as a series of RLC elements whose values match the specified unit length values of whatever cable you're considering. Assuming two cables of identical geometry, the only thing that will change will be the resistive element. And as that resistance drops, the corner frequency of the cable (acting as a low pass filter) will increase.

But...

The cable isn't the Lone Ranger here. It interacts with the rest of the system. So, depending on the output impedance of the source and the input imedance of the load, the actual effects of the cable on the audio signal will differ.

Consider, for example, a source with low output impedance and a load (say a headphone amplifier) with a high input impedance. As an example, Rout of 5 Ohms and Rin of 100 KOhms. A run of the mill copper cable might have as much as 1.5 Ohms of impedance across its length. Put that in series with 100 KOhms and...well...you can lower that cable's impedance and pretty much not do anything to the signal.

Even on the headphone side, Rload is still typically one or two orders of magnitude greater than the resistance of the cable. So, at least theoretically, I have a tough time with the idea that two cables of identical geometry, but made of copper or silver, are going to sound different. I can say that, by my ears, they don't...and that's my only conclusion.

-Drew

 

[null]

Yeah; I don't care for stuff like silver is bright and copper is darker. Feh.