Anti-Cables and magnet wire

Ever hear how they make Oxygen Free Copper? The process is called poling. They take a vat of molten copper and stir it with green pine sapling poles. The wood is consumed burned or slowly because of the sap, As a result the oxygen contained in the copper is consumed as it combines with the wood to burn it. The slag created by this process is skimmed off the top and now you have oxygen free copper. I am not kidding on this. I worked in an Engineering Group with three top Metallurgists and they confirmed it and showed me in their handbooks.

For those who have had success with magnet wire and are handy at soldering, you might also consider trying high-grade copper Litz wire. There's more work to do in attaching Litz wire to a spade or RCA/XLR, since each strand has to be connected separately. But you will probably find the sound materially better at a relatively comparable cost.

Yes!

I have been using magnet wire as my main speaker cable for about a year now.

After reading all the rave reviews of the Anti-Cables, I went to their site. I was curious about the "cheap" cables - which turned out to be $10/ft pair, which in my book isn't cheap - it's a little more than Kimber 4TC and a lot more than Audioquest Type 4. When I read that it was probably just high-quality magnet wire, I set out to find some.

I bought 80 feet of 12AWG magnet wire on eBay for $14.99. Not $14.99 per foot, $14.99 for 80 Feet!

At the time, I was using Audioquest Type 6 to internally biwire my B&W CDM 2SEs, but I wasn't terribly happy with the sound.

So I crafted, or rather, snipped and twisted a bi-wired pair of this stuff together. This wire is VERY stiff compared to "speaker cable" and it proved to be too large and unwieldy to connect to the binding posts of my NAD 7100 receiver.

So I made jumpers out of the wire (2" long or so) and used a single run.

WOW. As cliche as it sounds, I heard the "veil" lifted cleanly off. It sounded so much more dynamic and clear... how was this so?

I plugged my Type 6 pair back in, sure I was hearing things. With AQ cables, the sound was extremely dull, no air, and dynamics were slightly less...dynamic. I swapped them out for my Audioquest Type 4, which sounded, to my ears, exactly the same. I plugged my magnet wire in again, POW the sound opened up again - this wasn't subtle at all!

I put my Type 6s up on eBay that night, but kept my Type 4s around just in case...

A week ago I bought a NAD 304 Integrated from eBay and swapped it out. Despite the lower power rating, it is louder, punchier, and has more treble than my old 7100. I had actually considered selling my speakers because I thought they were too dull, but the 304 saved the day, they sound wonderful.

And as I tend to do, I began to wonder if the speaker cables weren't lending some brightness to the sound. Tonight I brought out the Audioquest Type 4s and plugged them in.

The bass was big, but again the treble air went away. Not as badly as with my utterly too warm NAD 7100, but still ever so slightly less airy.

I don't believe that cables have a "sound", but I do believe that electrical interactions due to impedance, capacitance, etc. cause different cables to sound different in a particular system. My point is that in my system, with an NAD amplifier and B&W speakers, the sound with magnet wire vs. Audioquest Type 2 and 4 is so superior that I will not be switching back. All of the amazing attributes written about the Anti-Cables ("fast", "like there's nothing between the amp and the speakers") apply to the lowly magnet wire.

Please note that this isn't "super-highly annealed, oxygen free" copper I'm using. This is someone's end of the spool regular ol' magnet wire of unknown origin. I am curious to hear the Anti-Cables just to see if the cheap stuff vs. the pure stuff makes a big difference.

I highly recommend trying a few feet of 12AWG magnet wire. As speaker cables. I can't substantiate any claims that smaller guage sounds better, as I'm so happy with these I don't feel a need to experiment. There is certainly no lack of speed or air with 12AWG.

I have never auditioned the anti-wires.
I have an Exemplar 2900 connected to a Bat integrated via a Yamamura Millenium 6000 interconnect. Both are powered through Foundation Research LC2 conditioner/power cords. My speakers are Opera Quintas.
Today I went to the Home Depot and purchased some 14 Ga. solid copper wire, red ones for + and green ones for -, and used these for speaker wires.
They're about 4 feet long, bare wire at the amp, bare wire going through both
the speaker binding post. I separated the green from the red wires by placing
wine bottle corks between them at about every foot, and tie wrapped the wires to the corks, two tie wraps per cork. I then ensured that the cables were bent well away from other wires, components, walls and floor.
I then started listening and became immediately aware that these solid core copper cables that cost me less than $6.00, right of the roll, totally blew away the $2,500.00 speaker cables that they replaced.
Try it, you only have six dollars to lose!

Honest1 -- yes I know. ETP (electrolytic tough pitch ) Copper, which is standard grade used in magnet wire, is usually specified as being >99.95% Cu. The O2 is usually between 200 and 500ppm, with metallic impurities in the range of 50ppm.

400 ppm is 99.96% pure; 200ppm is 99.98%pure.

Not to be confused with Ohno Cast copper...Much better and more $$$

"Continuously Cast" is actually pretty common, and I think (but don't know for sure) that nearly all copper these days is continuously cast for reasons of productivity, efficiency, etc.

Most of the generic magnet wire available has 200-400 ppm of oxygen to achieve the best combination of cost, conductivity, capacity for being cold worked. However, 99.95% and 99.99% oxygen free Copper magnet wire is generally available. The casual user, hobbyist, etc. may have a hard time finding some in retail quantities.

Do you know what grade of copper is used in magnet wire? I don't, but there is nothing onthe web page that indicates it is anything different than magnet wire.

From Speltz's web site ...

"The Difference
The Anti-Cable wire is made of one solid piece of highly annealed, super long drawn, Continuously Cast Oxygen Free Copper."

I would say the key words there are .... "Continuously Cast Oxygen Free Copper."

YMMV

Are you suer that's a better grade than regular magent wire? Do you know what grade of copper is used in magnet wire? I don't, but there is nothing onthe web page that indicates it is anything different than magnet wire.

The copper in the anti-cables is higher-quality copper. You can read up on it here:

http://www.anticables.com/technical.html