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Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys.

Silver versus copper.

Both metals are excellent conductors. Silver is slightly more conductive, but the designer can easily compensate by using larger diameter copper wire.

One place the two differ is in the electronic natures of their corrosion products. Both metals corrode on exposure to air. The oxide and sulfide of copper are semiconductors, while the corrosion products of silver are conductors.

The wire surface is important for high frequencies. Power cables are attached to 50 or 60 Hz sine wave voltage sources, but the equipment they feed draws current in wave forms that contain a lot of high frequencies. Depending on the power supply design, the power current waveforms may also contain filtered replicas of the audio signal. The semiconductive nature of the copper surface would make it an excellent place for these replicas to intermodulate with RF noise. On the other hand, the conductive nature of the silver surface makes it better for supporting RF resonances in the cable.

One metal is thus not necesssarily better than the other for power cord service. The individual characteristics have to be taken into account in the cable design.

Cryogenic treatment is simply an alternative way of annealing metal objects. Whether or not it helps the sound depends on the initial states of stress in the formed objects, and how badly those stresses affect the details of conduction through the objects. Something like an AC outlet may depend on the stresses in the metal to achieve a tight grip. Loosening the grip might cause more harm to the sound than the improvement in conduction.


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  • Silver versus copper. - Al Sekela 06/18/0709:47:46 06/18/07 (0)

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