@Grey9hound. Thanks for going through all that trouble! That was very interesting info!
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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. |
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