Cryotreatment and OCC copper - This time it's me shouting "bullpucky!"

[budgetblown]

Hey all.

I'm looking at building my own speaker cables, as the set I have is far, FAR too long. They're beauties, mega thick, silver beasties - but for me to make use of them with the custom rack setup I'm currently designing I'd basically end up chopping one pair in half - and I'd rather not do that - but I digress.

On my travels through the internet, I've been reading up on cable types. OCC copper and silver seem like a mighty fine idea to me - the cable is produced as basically one mega-long crystal, with copper the average crystal length is well over 100 metres - so the problem of signal transfer at the crystal boundaries is basically removed.

This makes sense to me.

What doesn't make sense to me is cryo treating the wire. Since cryo treatment is supposed to align the crystals for optimal transfer at the boundary, what's the point when there are no boundaries? I'm crying "foul" right here, right now.

If anyone can give some explanation of why there's a point to cryo-treating a wire that's basically one crystal, I'd be interested to learn, but right now I'm less than impressed.

 

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

Roger Russell is a hero for a very down to earth common sense approach to audio physics. He wrote a brilliant sendup on wire for nonoise speakers based upon silver plated spider thread.

His link http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm is well worth the read.

Personally I use mains cable. A few years ago I wired two pairs of speakers outside for the village fete. These were Lowthers and the two pairs were around 50 metres apart. I used a standard Technics 30W per channel amp with power meters in the SU-V or SU-Z series and the 50 metre remote pair of speakers were fed on the Blue and Brown wires of some standard 10mm2 Twin and Earth mains cable for the + and using the third wire intended for earth as the common neutral.

We used high quality instrumental music as the background for the fete and it was successful enough for children to ask where the musicians were hiding.

Single crystal copper wire sounds like some interesting hype. Really is there any evidence whatever that electrons have a difficulty crossing crystal boundaries? Is there any measured difference in conductivity which might be accounted for by an error of cross sectional area measurement?

Perhaps if you're looking for cable purporting to be fancier than mains then 6mm2 solar multi strand cable is an obvious candidate and it comes in both red and black versions insulated to 1000Volts guaranteed. So it's great even for wiring electrostatic elements too!

Another interesting effect is that of having dropped some uninsulated copper wire across the terminals of part of a 1/2 megawatthour battery bank. It was somewhat exciting. The resulting wire was delightfully oxidised and much softer to handle than before. I'm told that surface oxidation causes increased current to flow around the outside of the wire. Clearly something from which some commercial entrepreneur can profit . . .

Best wishes

David P

 

[Tel]

Cryogenic treatment of cables is abject nonsense

There was a thread in the tech section a while ago where a number of metallurgists contributed

http://www.hifiwigwam.com/showthread.php?18517-Cryogenics&highlight=cryogenics

 

[s2000db]

If you want a metallurgists view of whether a single crystal wire or cryo treatment will make any difference to the signal carried along a copper or silver wire, or any combination of the above...

Then I can set your mind at rest in that it won't sound any different to any other bit of copper wire, or any other metal for that matter..

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks for the link Kevin.

 

[budgetblown]

Magnet wire it is, then. Although when I changed from cheap Richer Sounds speaker cable to the solid silver beasties, there was a radical improvement in sound.

Low inductance homebrew cables in a short run will be an interesting comparison. I'm going to be building something along these lines:

http://diyaudioprojects.com/Power/Low-Inductance-DIY-Speaker-Cables/

just got to figure out what I'm going to build it out of, now, cable-wise. Any recommendation for good value banana plugs and spades gratefully received.