Well I have a few I am working with.Silver is intresting and the thing which I am finding most difficult is the factor of termination. Silver is primarily the wire I am working with at the moment not OTA.I did run across the Pigment Color page and thought it might interest those here.
The thing which I find Intriguing about OTA is the Insulation used. It is the best affordable copper cable I know of.
OTA is not the only cable to best. I am looking to find affordable cables that are superior to the run of the mill junk you find in audio, There seems to be a silver craze at the moment.
The price for a silver IC is outlandish and I would market a Silver IC for $70 if I could find a suitable RCA. The best so far are the Cardas SLVR and Homegrowns. Eichmanns are to expensive and are Copper.
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"I was under the impression (from discussion of the topic with a cable manufacturer) that it had to do with dialectic properties (perhaps the effecting the portion of the signal running on the outside if the wire)."
Funny thing about that is I thought I was the only one that thought that! I had just written to someone with very much the same sentiment along with the reason why cables sound different.
One of the things I had read recently was about why Van Den Hul got into the cable biz. When he was younger he was working for someone putting wire coils into phono cartridges and noticed that 2 wires that were the same in appearance and specs sounded different. He went to a authority, higher than himself, and posed the question as to why this is. He could not get a definitive answer which lead him on the journey which made him start his own company.
One of my theories is that the reason that cables sound different is the way electrons bounce off each other moving through a conductor and that the field around the conductor or movement of electrons interplays with the insulator. Cryo treatment seems to validate my belief that the composition being more uniform might allow for better interaction of forces after treatment.(Kind of tired right now, but I hope you get my drift).
If you look at tables for Insulator values you will find Teflon being the best,but I do not think it is in terms of what it does to sound or signal transfer. Air is the best ,but that is not what I am getting at. No one can tell you what is best in terms of allowing the signal through to be musical.
As for the cable cooker it only allows me cut the time on breakin that I really cannot do with music.Takes to long and is not thorough .If I want to test designs and geometries it is counter productive to what I am trying to accomplish.
My goal is to come up with designs that can compete with what many consider to be SOTA, but that are cost effective to all of us.
At the moment it is not the cost of the wires that is a drawback,but the cost of the connectors which more than anything add coloration to the sound.To find a minmalist design for a cost effective price has posed a challange.The best thus far has been Homegrowns Rhodium over Silver at like $3.50ea..For Silver it's the Cardas SLVR's .I am still testing ,but it is fair to say they are better for Silver wire purposes. Eichmanns are good for the minimalist pursuit,but they are pretty costly at approx.$40 for a set of 4.
Anyways I got into this because I was tired of hearing and seeing people at the mercy of the higher priced company made IC's\Speaker cables and felt I could make or come up with original designs that could compete and be cost effective. I have 3 designs at the moment that no one else has come up with that are in the way of the purist pursuit that I feel might very well be competitive to wires costing many times more. They are in the way of an Air Dielectric that look and sound good, but they are still being tested and retested to be certain.
It takes 50hrs on the burner then 10hrs of play before any serious listening can be accomplished. I feel my system is adequate for this type of testing to see weather there is something worthy of consideration or not. I would certainly not try to sell something which I felt did not sound good or to put another way which I felt I would not like to have as far as quality of sound.
Silver has it's advantages over OTA, but only in the HF falloff. Some test I have done was lacking in the midrange or soundstaging. Like I said it's all preliminary and there is alot more testing I shall be doing, but then again some designs are very promising.
I like OTA and Silver seems to be more of my focus now because of what I see to be outlandish prices out there for it. I would like to come up with a good Silver IC for under $60. The $70 mark is where I am at right now, but I am not completely satisfied with it either. Either way I do not think that I will be able to get to the $60 mark because of the price of RCA’s which I have a design for on paper. If I still had access to a CNC and a machine shop I would easily beable to beat the $60 mark by producing my own RCA’s that would also be non-metallic. A lot of what I know about manufacturing and eingineering could prove valuable in my pursuit. Some I have not used in years.
Rambled enough!Later
