Thiel Owners

prof

Which Silver cables/cords do you endorse?

Happy Listening!

I don't endorse any.  In most realistic use cases there would be no need to pay extra money for silver cables.   Silver is a teeny bit more conductive than copper, but even that can be made up by a higher awg copper wire.   And in most non-extreme cases (e.g. crazy long cable runs) it's not hard at all to choose a copper wire of sufficient awg and characteristics to work just fine.


Properly used, there is no inherent "characteristics" of "silver wire" that changes the frequency balance vs copper, such as to actually thin out the sound (e.g. by attenuating frequencies in the warmth range - e.g 60 to 250Hz or lower mid 250 to 500Hz range).  



It's a psychological thing.  We know silver is visually "bright" so audiophiles imagined "sounds bright," this became an audiophile meme, and so now there's the "silver sounds bright" or "thin" concept among audiophiles.

Silver coated cables may extend the life of some cables, but that's about it - it's not going to change the sound in proper use cases.

tom,

That's wild all the tweaks you are trying out!

It's hard to know whether, even if "improved" by technical or modern standards, whether I'd still prefer the 02s with all those changes.Would love to hear some of them, though!

Tom Thiel..

About the Sonoran wire from Starsound..this product line has been made since the early 90's and has never had any relationship with MIT. As with all our products the Audio Points and Sistrum family of audio racks and platforms.. and most of the cables... we have designed in methods for resonance control and mechanical grounding. 

We know from years of listening experience that any mechanical conductor such as a listening room a speaker cabinet a stand and any type of electrical conductor can be altered by vibration and resonance. We have learned from previous works that if you overdamp a product that you eat into the spectrum that suggests that you are listening to a live event. There is a fine line in keeping it real. Even a signal wire can be over controlled and we accrued many  hours listening to the same wire again and again surrounded by different materials and geometric shapes even in the same family of  elements. While we thought that a container of steel bearings 5 million per pound would sound the best around our conductor we instead sonically chose surrounding the conductor with the same material and geometry but one which had a part count of 970,000 bearings per pound. And no I didn't make a part count myself.  Even the conductor can be damped to sonic detriment. Same with speaker stands. No to sand or lead shot as those materials have a very low shear velocity and will overdamp the device. Even with the steel shot we usually suggest filling a post 1/2 to 2/3's..As you add more you suddenly hear too much darkness and then the sound stage begins to shut down.  Darkness and virtually no light. Not that. 

Recently I have been experimenting with materials and coatings that can be easily applied to many different shapes and surfaces. They control shear induced resonance which travels on and thru any solid material.  I have applied this same material to an active room device that greatly enhances laminar flow and reduces the impression of room boundaries. Listening in wide open space.  Tom

Tweak - can you speak to why you chose iron (magnetic) rather than stone (more innert)?

Tom Thiel

The metal and its shape is more reactive to vibration. In this case the reactive material will dissipate the vibrational energy because of  the bearing motion. The steel bearing can also be another barrier to RFI penetration along with any other metal barrier that may already exist around the conductor. 

Back to the whole shear velocity thing. In this case you don't want even smaller more densely packed particles that have very slow velocities because they could or will over damp the copper or silver wire. As I wrote earlier with the same material and shape the smallest material that could be more densely packed did not sound as good as it's larger brother of the same shape which is less densely packed.
Any single material boundary can swamp and overwhelm the sound of another material and its boundary.. 

From the International Atomic Energy Agency below.

I found this years ago and forgot and found it again recently. I want to post this on other threads as it will describe how particle waves react with each other and their material boundaries.  https://www.ndt.net/forum/files/ut--.pdf
Look to pages 38 to 41 or so. What is described is how and what we hear and how different materials and shapes sound the way they do.

I want to thank a lady Debbie Miles, a seismologist for 40 years, she has greatly influenced my venture into how materials and shapes interact and their influence on what we hear.. Tom