Does silver speaker wire sound bright?


I purchased a kit of 99.999% pure silver speaker wire with PTFE insulation and assembled it. I installed it on my system and it seems to scream at me. My system is all tube (Melos)and my speakers are the North Creek Rhythm. I use the preamp also as a headphone amp and use Grado SR325's. The headphones are not bright they lean tward a little dark sounding. I feel the brightness is in the cables and wounder if they will mellow with age, and how long will it take?
mi3491
Stranded silver sounds more etched in my system, yet extremely detailed. Solid silver seems smooth sweet & more accurate in timbre. It depends on the brightness of the rest of your system and the listening room. I sometimes switch from stranded to solid silver to change the systems character,but always migrate back to the solid silver. Silver is a better conductor for interconnects but you have to be careful with its implementation. I tried changing a 2 inch long internal wire on my DAC from the stock common stranded copper to solid and stranded silver and it changed the sound of the unit for the worse- bright, etched, harsh, made only certain program material sound correct. Many times the designers try all types of internal wires in development and design a units "characteristic sound" around their choice of wire.
I am using a silver balanced digital interconect. My other interconects are Distech Platinum and Cardas Hexlink 5. My Speaker cables are three separate pairs of pure silver wire equaling 15 AWG individually wrapped in PTFE. My amp and preamp are tube and the DAC is a PS Audio Ultrlink II. I am pretty sure it is not the electronics. The system is sounding smoother each day, but the bass is not a strong as I had hoped.
And it won't be, with just a 15 gauge speaker cable. Going from 10 gauge to 13 gauge makes a huge difference, so going from 13 to 15 would be noticeable also. The higher series DC resistance of a smaller cable will always have this effect, unless it's a network terminated cable. However, if your amp has a low damping factor, it is limited in the degree to which it can reproduce dynamics and bass extension/slam in the first place. My Krell amp has high current capability, but a lowish damping factor (like 50), and I've found that I can only go so big with speaker cable gauge, before the entire frequency range loses focus. I ATTRIBUTE THIS to the higher capacitance that always accompanies higher cross sectional conductor area. However, not all cables of the same gauge sound the same, or arrange their conductors the same, so I still experiment with it. You have to find a balance between the speed you want with a low capaciatance/high resistance cable, and a low resistance/high capacitance cable.......................I've seen some cable advertisements that claim you can have both, but you can't. All you need to do is look at their own published specs, and you discover that they certainly have not circumvented physics with some kind of "magic".............Personally, I'm to the point where I'm liking chaep MIT speaker cables over my expensive silver ones...and it's NOT because my Krell amp is "cold and analytical", either.
My personal experience with silver speaker cable and interconnects is that they are faster, more detailed, and more transparent than their copper counterparts. They also tend to lack the weight and body of copper as well. Therefore, component matching and break-in are very important. If your system is already generous in the bottom-end, silver may be just the ticket. Without proper break-in, silver can definitely sound annoyingly etched.