Cable Geometry

My 2 cents: as I'm sure you know, the physics is discovered after the empirical discovery, or not ever. That said, I realize "but why" can be important for some in this hobby to validate observations.

As for silver, for what it's worth, after trying a LOT of cables my experience is that silver is not "brighter", rather the difference in sound correlates to cable architecture and not to material. I've ran through all of the thinking @TwoEars did, but none of that helped me predict if cable X would sound better, different, or worse than cable Y and it's way easier to just try them (and free with good vendors).

I have a physicist friend with a startup and he specializes in metals science and builds his own vacuum tubes to power his custom-built electron microscopy equipment so he can analyze metal conduction properties in new ways for bleeding-edge industrial applications. I asked him about silver vs copper and he said, "yeah, nobody really knows, that's all mostly guesswork right now, but we're looking into it".

ADMIN EDIT (@ultrabike): Interesting points. Jump to the post linked below for further information on cable characteristics and some further interesting points:

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/cable-geometry.6907/#post-227519

 

Lol, I know that feeling. I've been there. I have a science background as well and I've long since come to accept that there are things we don't know and which will probably be far beyond our ability to grasp for the foreseeable future. The everyman on the street assumes that the scientists are taking care of business in order to keep things running, well... we keep things running but don't assume we know how any of this shit works. For instance, we can 'describe' the effects of gravity and space time but we can't fundamentally explain the *why* of it.

As for how any of this relates to audio it means I'm humble and continuously open minded. Sit me down in front of what you consider a better sounding silver system and I'm ready to take notes.

Your thoughts on cable architecture are also definitely relevant, it could be a combination of many complex things and interactions. I'm personally quite interested in the boundary effects of cables and surfaces... which have many interesting properties. I have a hunch that many things in the cable audio world could be described by this but I don't think we're quite there yet.

 

Yeah, I'll take both. Real physics are fuzzy. The real world is grey, not black and white. Actual love is amber with dark spots, not hot red.

 

Speaking as a guy who spent far too many years in grad school and research specifically in the fields of metallurgy... yeah pretty much this. If people want to argue copper vs silver vs alpha whatever that they don't really understand, go right ahead. The geometry and terminations will overall have orders of magnitude greater effect than the material used.

Trying to hack an existing component by replacing copper with silver will probably have detrimental effects if you don't properly clean off and resolder everything perfectly with proper metal-on-metal contact instead of solder bridging everywhere.

 

As a fellow scientist please feel free to talk dirty to me in relation to granules, geometry and electrical conductivity if you have anything interesting to share. I didn't major in it but I learned enough not to cool big pieces of metal in a fridge.

 

You may be onto something

 

Random tidbits:
- silver is only marginally more conductive than copper (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5%)
- grain boundaries will decrease conductivity, manufacturing/processing can affect said grain boundaries; the overall effect is still not that big
- electrons move incredibly slowly; they do not zip through the wire at the speed of light, more like <1mm/s
- electrons also do not move in a straight line; they bounce and move about randomly, and they exert pressure on each other
- the electrical signal is pretty fast, but not "speed of light" fast
- skin effect is pretty much a non concern at anything near the audio frequencies unless you're running solid core 10awg wiring to pump kilowatts into your apparently ultra low sensitivity tweeter
- you can also think of wire/geometry more like a waveguide rather than as a tube that you push electrons through
- almost every single discontinuity in the path of the signal (every mating surface, every resistor, every component, etc) is going to have a greater effect on signal flow than the material itself

 

Bluejeanscable has their ultrasonic welded cables which is great... although I'd actually like to peer at the quality of the weld under an SEM and see what the crystal structure is like. I'm sure anything there would be better than a tin/lead solder film layer, but I'm still curious what the weld structure looks like. Whether there's a transition phase or epitaxial growth phenomena, precipitation phases, heat affected zones, etc.

 

I have a suspicion that any difference in perceived sound between silver and copper would be better explained by psychology than physics. Just a suspicion, mind.

 

@Torq has talked about Cable Geometry before, I'd love to hear his thoughts on it again

 

We need some whiskey with this subject

 

Way ahead of you

 

Benchmark on starquad geometry: https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/ap...-the-importance-of-star-quad-microphone-cable

Atomicbob on usb cable shielding: https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...hield-resistance-technical-measurements.5662/

 

I wonder... If you asked them, would they tell?

If you do, and they do, then looking forward to the result, please.

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Deleted stuff about silver because it has nothing to do with geometry, and only repeats same-old same-old cable stuff
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Interesting, thanks for the informative post. I have no EE knowledge, but my vocation is networking and this mirrors the situation with optical fiber. You can have kilometers of fiber with very little attenuation of the signal, but once you start adding splice points that is where the loss occurs.

This also explains why, when I read about mods for my speakers, that people often talk in terms of removing these transition points. In the case of bypassing the fuses for instance, it is described thus: "In this way you replace this situation: [wire/solder/fuse box/fuse contact/fuse/fuse contact/fuse box/solder/wire/solder/binding post] by this one: [wire/solder/binding post], so saving EIGHT steps to the signal path, and not only the fuse itself, which would be the case if you just replace the fuse by some quality wire."