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RE: PCOCC Direction

LOL!

All 6N wire starts off with an ingot in a vacuum sealed pouch (I contacted Nippon Mining and they confirmed this, and as a matter of fact was the only way they sold 6N copper). Once you break that seal it starts absorbing air immediately. Once you draw wire through mechanical dies, it is no longer 6N. If the company drawing the wire does not maintain special dies solely for the 6N copper and not draw them in a vacuum atmosphere, the drawing of regular copper and other metals will have contaminated those dies even further.

In other words, all claims of 6N wire is akin to McD's claims of 1/4 pound BEFORE cooking. The only manufacturers who may truly have a 6N final product are those companies which hot draws the wire in a vacuum atmosphere (Acoustic Zen and Harmonic Technology). Even those products are subject to deterioration by exposure to air prior to insulating.

One prominent wire manufacturer claims that the chief advantage of cryogenic treatment is that the cryo treatment literally shrinks the metal, thereby forcing out any atmospheric gasses imbedded in the metal from the drawing process or from the casting of the ingot (non 6N ingots). Typically you can raise regular electrolytic copper (3N pure) to OHFC (4N pure) by cryoing the wire. Even if starting from a 6N ingot, you would be hard pressed to arrive at 4N purity after mechanically drawing down the ingot. The ingot goes through too many dies in order to arrive at the final gauge.

YMMV, of course,

Stu

PS. You maybe interested to know how they make the 6N copper and silver. A purified ingot goes through a vacuum chamber in which the ingot is subjected to a narrow strip heater. It moves very slowly through the chamber and the heater is restricted to only a small portion of the ingot. The impurities tend to stay within the near molten section. As the ingot slowly moves through the heater, the hot section slowly moves towards the rear of the ingot. After they finish the pass, the final inch or so of the ingot is cut off and the process repeated in order to further purify the copper.

Remember that in chemistry, reagent grade is 99.9% pure and that is generally regarded as being the typical purest grade available. A 99.9999% purity is truly extraordinary and it is mind boggling to me that such purity can be made commercially available. Still, any atmospheric exposure would be detrimental to that purity. Even if insulated air can creep along the insulation metal interface and eventually corrode the metal. IIRC, Tara labs had a special paint to seal the insulation/metal interface at the termination in order to limits this creep along the insulation. The issue would be worse for the typical audiophile teflon insulation, since teflon does not stick t the copper (or silver).


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  • RE: PCOCC Direction - unclestu 04/16/1213:11:01 04/16/12 (0)

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