Silver Speaker Cables

@charles1dad you are a true gentleman ;-) tip of my hat to you.

On cables to the OP - you have been given a lot of informed advice with some low risk listening experience options….. The Kimber you are using is excellent  affordable wire and works in many systems. IME better executed copper at tge lower price points typically beats silver … see @mulveling  comments about silver content… and think thru what is required $ to build an all silver speake wire of any substance at reasonable $. Purity and mass unfortunately cost…… ask the Hunt brothers…. ha.

i have lost a lot of sleep lately..listening late into the night…not analytically…but immersed in emotional engagement with 3 new loaner cables from Audioquest.. Thunderbird ( Copper ), Firebird ( Silver ), and finally Dragon ( silver w silver ground )….. All destroy a very good sounding Sky XLR …..

My hat is off to Garth at Audioquest….. now get the new architecture deployed down the line for those with lower budgets….

Best to those chasing musical satisfaction 

Jim

Thanks for your kind comment Jim. I appreciate your consistently  insightful posts on this forum.

Charles

I had the Ag-over-Cu NORDOST FREY thin ribbon cables array. As I changed speakers, the migration to all-Cu commenced …, the preferred metal option is intuitively system dependent .

However, ….

Curiously as I swapped in the comparatively hefty CARDAS CLEAR ICs and CLEAR REFLECTION speaker cables, the highlights in the following published guidance rang true for my system. The speaker wire diameter mattered significantly, not just the choice of metal.

AUDIO: SPEAKER CABLES - From Alan Shaw (owner and designer of HARBETH)

” … So, the moral of the story is this: the most important factor of the loudspeaker cable that you should select is the amount of metal in the cable core. More metal means lower resistance.

If the core is round (as most are) then the correlation is simple: the fatter the diameter of the metal core the better because the electrical resistance between amp and speaker will be lower.

Thin and really thin cores should be avoided regardless of how exotic the metal material is claimed as the lack of metal in the core conductor will increase resistance. That will reduce amplifier damping, effect the frequency response of the speaker and give unpredictable results that will vary from amp/speaker combination.

Do not be fooled by the diameter of the external plastic sheath: what matters is the metal content of the core. The more the better, without exception….”

My take: I haven’t seen many hefty and quality- build silver cables because of the costs. I’m not knocking NORDOST, in their premium lines ( I had them in my prior system as a fine shotgunned speaker cable ) . However , I had less than satisfying results in their lower model lines where metal content was reduced .

Go figger.

@akg_ca the Alan Shaw extract is interesting, and brings to mind the speaker cables I bought from NRG Custom Cables in Canada.

Nawaz who owns the company seems to follow a similar philosophy; the more metal/conductor, the better. I've had his 6:6 copper speaker cables in my system for a few months, boy are they heavy/thick, and were a marked improvement over previous Atlas SCs. I won't go on as this thread is focused on silver 👍😊

@akg_ca 

+1. Nordost makes some of the most amazing cables. I agree, at the high end they are amazing… but much less impressive at the low end… I made this observation as well.