Cable Asylum: Re: Why does silver wire sound different than copper wire? by Myles B. Astor

Silver reacts differently to impurities than copper does, and the disruption of it's crystalline structure will therefore differ. This could influence the current flow in silver compared to copper. It has been claimed that silver must be of a much higher purity than copper to sound better.

While I agree that Ag sounds different than Cu, there are very few instances where the different type metals are used in exactly the same cable design. As we know, the geometry, materials (you've got silver plate, different Ag purities, Ag impregnated Ag, etc), shielding, dielectric, connectors, solder, all affect the sound of a cable. In fact, one of the few that comes to mind is AQ. Though I've preferred Cu based cables over silver (especially for their "ease"), there are some other area where silver is preferable (say in transparency and lack of certain distortions/blurring).

I'm in fact doing a survey of six different speaker cables for the next issue of UA and it strikes me that there profound enough differences among different Ag containing (also there are cables like Siltech and Kharma that use Au impregnated silver) that it makes it very difficult to generalize now about a "silver" sound. The best of the newer Ag cables, have less of that "Ag" sound than ever before.

There's also another school of thought out there too that Ag cables take much longer to break in than Cu cables; ergo, many people haven't heard "properly" broken in Ag cables. Some who make Ag cables like Bob Crump of TG Labs run their silver cables in on say a MOBIE for a month constantly to break them in.

Myles B. Astor
Publisher
Ultimate Audio