Home Cable Asylum

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

Fraid I agree with Steve on this one...

""We know normal copper wire is made up of many crystals of different shapes and there are gaps/cracks (even very minor) between crystals which degrade sound.""

Within the wire, the "grain boundaries" are lattice dislocations...different crystal directions on either side of the boundary. They are not necessarily "impact sites" for moving electrons, as the electrons do not see the macroscopic patterns of the lattice we see under a microscope...
I do not know why the visual crystal boundaries would degrade the sound..and at cryogenic temperatures, the boundaries certainly do not impede the movement of electrons..

""To overcome this weakness, some manufacturers use gold to fill up the gaps.""

Manu's will plate gold onto the surface...but grain boundaries within the wire are not "gaps", but merely lattice discontinuities..Gold atoms are too small to easily fill the lattice "weak spots", but are typically deposited onto the surface of the wire...Annealing to diffuse the gold into the copper will work only on the surface, driving in perhaps one to two hundred microinches, but does not drive the gold into the grain boundaries, but throughout the bulk of the copper..Indeed, many manufacturers require the use of a "strike", 5 to 20 microinches of nickel, to keep the gold from penetrating the copper..

Plating, matte finish, is porous and not smooth, while bright (or shiny) gold plating requires the use of organic levellers, additional impurities required to stall the deposition rate on high gradient points of the plating surface..

""Others come out with single crystal or zero crystal design to avoid any drawback of the crystals' gaps, etc.""

It is not possible to have zero crystal..And, unless you can avoid bending the copper, it is not possible to have single crystal wire...

Bending of any kind, regardless of radius of curvature, will generate slip plane faults, easily spotted under a metallurgical scope..

Cheers, John




This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
  Sonic Craft  


Follow Ups Full Thread
Follow Ups
  • Fraid I agree with Steve on this one... - jneutron 05/22/0321:15:26 05/22/03 (0)


You can not post to an archived thread.