Quote:
Originally Posted by Lazarus Short /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I was told years ago by a fellow whose opinion I trusted that wire is wire. Has anyone really demonstrated that these make any difference?
metal [copper, silver, steel, zinc, lead, even carbon]
oxygen content
crystal structure
construction [litz, etc]
insulation
Laz
|
Nobody has to trust anyone's opinion. It's a fact that wire is indeed wire. Fact. Not opinion. Very much fact. Very much scientifically proven and verified thousands of times a day in thousands of technologies for hundreds of years now. The behavior of copper wire is, you could say, well-known. I'm a materials scientist and my reputation depends on knowing exactly how materials respond and what they can take and what their limitations are (I actually work on solar cells). But you don't have to be, you only need a modicum of common sense and insight to realize that, in audio, wire is indeed wire.
The metal used has a huge effect on the resistivity of a given size wire. Silver is the most conductive, followed by gold and copper and aluminum and steel. You can look these up in any textbook or google. The oxygen content has an appreciable effect on the resistance of the wire as well. The resistivity of copper drops off pretty fast with increasing oxygen content. And crystalinity also effects resistivity, rather significantly.
But resistivity doesn't really matter, because if a cable is too resistive, all it does is attenuate the volume of the speaker. It doesn't distort the signal in any other way. That's why we have volume controls. Volume controls are variable
resistors. It's completely absurd to worry about the resistivity of speaker wire, when you add hundreds or thousands of ohms of resistance for volume control.
The construction of an audio cable doesn't really matter. The 'skin effect' is a complete joke. Cosmic rays probably effect the signal more, at audio frequencies. And if the skin effect WAS a problem, using multistrand wires would have nothing to do with it. As you would know if you paid attention in electrodynamics class, the net effect of a multistrand bundle of wire, with respect to the skin effect, is the same as a solid wire of the same diameter. At very high (like radio and up) frequencies, where the skin effect IS a real phenomenon, engineers use copper tubing (because the conduction happens more on the surface), sometimes with coolant running inside in high-power applications.
Capacitances introduced with respect to speaker cable design are completely irrelevant, and it's up in the air whether they are actually a bad thing anyway. As you may know, your speakers have many microfarads worth of
capacitors in them,
on purpose, to add
capacitance. The manufacturing tolerance of these capacitors, and their variation with temperature is more than the entire capacitance of even a cable that is purposely designed to add capacitance. The only place that capacitance could really matter is the lowest-level stage of an LP playback chain. And then not very much, because cartridges are all different as to their preferred capacitance, again, less is not necessarily better.
Wire is wire. Buy the cheapest you can find. I use common lamp cord from home depot. I do insist that one of the conductors is marked somehow so that I can easily hook them up, and that they are of sensible gauge. Cables sold specifically for audio are at best completely shameless marketing and at worst, downright fraud.
