Pure Silver Wire

I've been building pure silver speaker cables and power cords for years from three-nines soft-annealed round wire or flat wire sourced from Rio Grande.   The key to avoiding stridency is soft-annealing.   A wise manufacturer of 4-nines silver wire once shared with me that 4-nines or higher is largely a marketing gimmick.   

Remember brightness or harshness varies a lot from person to person.  Be tweeters are harsh to some.

One reason this could vary is hearing loss.  As an old guy, my upper frequencies are weak so if something seems harsh to me, all I have to do is take my hearing aids out and voila, no harshness. 

but music sounds much better with my hifi hearing aids in, so I prefer to avoid enhanced upper frequencies and listen with them in.

Jerry

Good cable design has many different elements as mentioned. Just talking about silver vs copper is part of this picture. I’ve recently been using both Zenwave all silver ICs (latest version of the D4) and power cables. These cables use OCC silver which was designed to minimize grain structure in the cable. In speaking with Dave at Zenwave, he has experimented with many different aspects of the cables to get where they are right now.

He does make OCC silver speaker cables and yes, they are expensive. There are definitely price differences in different levels of “pure” silver or copper.

In very general terms, and in fear of stating the obvious:  

1. You do not see more solid silver cables due to cost of materials.  
2. Silver cables tend to sound fast, clear, and thin.  I used a highly regarded by The Absolute Sound solid silver design when running Krell with Apogees in the late 90s to early 00s with good results.  However, when moving on to more transparent electronics and speakers I moved to a more modern design copper which provided warmth and density, while maintaining detail.  
3. Cheap silver cables I have experience with sound etched and harsh.  
   Cheep copper thick and muddy.  
4. There is much more to cable design than conductor material or solid vs multi strand.  The materials and design of the dielectric, heat dissipation technology, conductor crystalline structure, and conductor geometry all play a role in SQ.  

Hi Everyone,

There are many different grades of silver and many different gauges of silver. Pure silver has a shorter molecule distance then pure copper which makes it faster and more accurate in terms of sound quality.

Pure silver is actually smoother sounding and slightly more laid-back sounding then pure copper. The biggest issue is that there are lots of cable manufacturers representing 99% pure silver when the wire actually has a very small percentage of pure silver with an alloy coating over top of the silver. This is creating a cataract type of affect to the cable. This is much worse sounding than pure copper.

I have listened to many cables that were supposed to be pure silver and then had a metallurgy check the cable to find out that it had a very small percentage of silver. Pure silver is indeed the best sounding and the most expensive cable to build. If you're looking for accuracy, inner detail, better sound staging and a more realistic sounding system then IMHO 100% pure silver is your cable.

Robert Neill