Taralabs cables

Grey9hound, like I said, Tara lab's has NOT made consonant alloy since 1995, I said this a couple of post ago, what the Tara lab's cable's are now for the last 20 years is NO consonant alloy at all.

For some (perhaps) useful info about copper purity, read on.

From a 6 Moons interview with Caelin Gabriel of Shunyata Research...

http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/caelin/caelin_2.html

An excerpt from the interview is pasted below.

"The wire used in all of our products, even the least expensive, is designed and produced to our specifications. You won't find Mil-Spec or cable warehouse wire used in our products. People who claim six or eight nines purity? Let's just say that you cannot obtain certification papers for this type of purity. Anywhere. It doesn't exist - except in our audiophile world. Copper is specified by CDA numbers which are the technical grades of the raw metal. The top-quality copper with certification papers is CDA-101. It has a specification of 99.997% purity. There are lesser grades such as CDA-102, 103 or 112- but you won't get certification papers. There's ETP copper which is a standard grade. There's mil-spec copper commonly used in hookup wire. CDA-101 wire can't be bought off the shelf. You have to make it yourself from the raw copper ingots.

So, as I said previously - we do exhaustive testing of all materials including wire purity. Wire purity does make a difference - to a point. Where the copper is mined is often more important than the absolute purity, just as purveyors of semi- or precious stones will have preferences for certain mines due to the types of impurities or inclusions that occur in various geographical locations. Naturally, we guard some of the more important findings and conclusions as our intellectual property. What I can say? Take drinking water. You obviously don't want lead or other toxic heavy metals. But how about calcium, iron or certain trace elements? Impurities aren't all the same by a long shot. Some in fact may be desirable. Think of steel metallurgy where the deliberate inclusion of minute amounts of foreign substances radically alters the materials properties of the raw metal.

Purity is very important as it relates to corrosion. Since electrons travel primarily on the surface of the conductor, copper oxide molecules become a significant impediment to current flow. That makes outrageous claims of 1ppm purity (1 part-per-million) inside the conductor utterly irrelevant."

A concise and well-referenced primer on copper and copper wire in Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_wire_and_cable#cite_note-PH08-3

Hi Ghosthouse, what does this author tring to say here?,quote-People who claim six or eight nines purity? Let's just say that you cannot obtain certification papers for this type of purity. Anywhere. It doesn't exist - except in our audiophile world.End quote, Tara Lab's has patent's and trade mark for haveing the purest copper conductor's in the world, Here is the Tara lab's conductor info, full of trade mark's and patent's,The RSC Gen 2 (SA-OF8N) Conductor

Super Annealed, Oxygen Free, Eight Nines Copper (SA-OF8N) is the new standard in high performance copper purity.

TARA Labs Rectangular Solid Core® conductors are completely produced in the USA. We start with Oxygen Free Eight Nines Copper (99.999999%), and the copper rods are extruded into long, unbroken, mono-crystal copper rectangular conductors. The conductors are extruded into a unique rectangular shape having specific ‘frequency-tuned’ proportions. Rectangular Solid Core conductors are annealed with a process known as Super Annealing™.

Super Annealing™ or SA, softens the RSC® conductor and increases its conductivity. After annealing, the RSC conductors are polished in-line, and will become finished SA-OF8N® Rectangular Solid Core conductors ready for insulation using advanced polymers or liquid-film technology.

TARA Labs has continuously advanced the design and materials used in its conductor technologies. Previously, in our lower priced consumer grade cables, we were limited to the use of 6N, or six-nines (99.9999%) pure copper and the OCC or Ohno-Continuous Cast copper technologies.

Since the development of Rectangular Solid Core, we have moved beyond these lesser quality materials with the use of higher purity copper and our exclusive USA technologies.
and this id the new generation 3 conductor here, used only in the Grandmaster Evolution interconnect-Making Sense of….Gen 3 Conductors

TARA Labs, Inc. has just announced the introduction of its Generation 3 Rectangular Solid Core® conductor, to be used exclusively in its state-of-the-art interconnect cable.

TARA Labs claims that the Gen 3 conductor has an increased bandwidth or high-frequency extension, that makes it unrivalled in important test measurements and listening tests.

TARA Labs’ Vice President of Product Design, Matthew Bond, said that the new Gen 3 conductor has the same current-carrying capability of a 28 gauge conductor but has the high frequency linearity of a 40 gauge conductor.

Matthew Bond explains why this is possible. “In a conductor with a rectangular profile, there is a huge reduction of ‘flux-linkage’ or ‘coupling’ of electromagnetic lines of force. These lines of force are created as the signal (music) passes through any conductor.” Bond said further, “In a round conductor there is a large center that tends to roll-off or attenuate much more of the high frequency information … this does not happen in a Rectangular Solid Core® conductor”.

According to Matthew Bond, the new Gen 3 Rectangular Solid Core® conductor is smaller than the current Gen 2 conductor used in most of TARA Labs’ audio cables. The Gen 2 conductor measures approximately 25 thousands of an inch wide and 12 thousands of an inch in height. Bond says that the Gen 3 conductor is about 66% of the size of the Gen 2 conductor, and that it is Super-Annealed™ to increase its conductivity.

Both the Gen 2 conductor and the smaller Gen 3 conductor are said to be Eight-Nines™ pure copper, which is 99.999999% pure. TARA Labs’ trademarks for this technology are 8N™ and SA-OF8N®. SA-OF8N means Super Annealed – Oxygen Free 8 Nines copper. According to Bond, the term ‘annealing’ refers to the method whereby a conductor can be made softer and more conductive.

Here is more patent and trade marked info about Tara lab's conductor's, Why Rectangular?

Our patented RSC conductors have become the definitive technology in high-end audio cables. The rectangular shape offers a unique advantage over round conductors. They have the necessary mass for solid bass, yet are thin enough for a coherent reproduction of mid-range and high frequencies. The RSC is not subject to the same high frequency losses that hamper traditional round conductors. To further understand the principle behind RSC technology, it is necessary to understand a phenomenon known as "skin effect" This principle states that in a round conductor, higher frequencies will tend to travel towards the outside (or skin) of the conductor, while lower frequencies will travel closer to the center of the conductor. The larger the diameter of a round conductor, the worse the effect will be, resulting in a significant roll-off of high frequencies in large gauge conductors. Because of its rectangular cross section, an RSC conductor essentially has no center like a round conductor. Therefore it does not suffer the same high frequency losses.

As seen on consumer review's of the Tara Lab's web-site,“The Omega Gold has a depth to the sound stage unmatched by any other cable I have listened to, incredible air, bass, mid-range to die for, transit speed is off the charts, very holographic sounding 3-dimensional life like sound, this cable will immerse you in music nirvana, if you want one of the best speaker cable's available, look no further, truly a game changer.” - Keith Henry-AudioLabyrinth