Highly Polished wire????

Dan,

Thanks for the kind words. By the way, if you are interested in investigating the company where I once worked, check out their website:

http://www.electroscience.com/index.html

I was in R & D, and developed many products over the years, which I take a lot of pride in the fact that they are listed on the site as current products. My favorite part of the field was designing conductors and resistors. Some of our customers were Vishay, Dale, CTS, Sprague, Ohmite, NTK, Bosch - suppliers to the high end industry.

While most of the things I dealt with were precious metals, I am not a jeweler, so my ideas about polishing wire may be way off base. However, as I did quite a lot of wirebonding(you know, the hairlike connections in a microchip from the actual chip to the leads) and microwelding. So, I got to buy a lot of aluminum, silver, gold, and platinum wire. Which is probably the reason why I am so virulently opposed to expensive audio cables. Believe me, even when we pay $100/m for a silver interconnect we are absolutely being taken to the cleaners. If I told you how much I could put together a set of gold interconnects for, we would all be crying.

As I am not a jeweler, I come from a different perspective as to how suitable a material is for the purpose of polishing a wire for high end audio applications. I will say that the composition of jeweler's rouge should be ascertained so as to be able to best remove its residue from the wire.

Obviously, there is a danger in "fixing something that isn't broken". By that I mean that if a wire is in good condition from the get go, one could muck things up by going about this business. I would say there would be something to act as a carrier in the composition, such as a polymer and solvent vehicle(be they both natural or synthetic). Once those ingredients are known, I would be able to recommend how to remove whatever residue is left.

In terms of abrasives, zirconia(zirconium oxide), tungsten carbide, or alumina(aluminum oxide) would all seem fine. What is a surprise to most people is that metals are pretty soft, especially in comparison to ceramics(oxides, carbides, nitrides, etc.) But, in order to obtain the type of polish you would be after, one would have to cascade the grit of abrasive. Progressively moving to finer and finer grits. I know from metal and furniture polishing that 400 and 600 grits leave a very smooth finish. 600 grit would be better.

But, is sanding wire a good thing? I think the starting point of the wire is the most important factor. If one were to buy very high grade silver or copper, and its surface appeared good, leave it alone. Maybe just treat it chemically(acetone, xylene, a glycol ether acetate, etc.) to remove any organic matter which had accumulated via handling.

Finally, perhaps Kondo - san from Audio Note knows best. He developed a way to draw the silver wire through the diamond dies during the wire's manufacture which in his view sounds best. To him, like many people's view of the initial audio signal, things must be perfect from their inception, once lost, it can never be regained.

GOOD LUCK!

Trelja,

Thanks again for the informative post. I went and looked at Audio Notes web site and I noticed they sell 99.99% wire. Yet there are those here and on other sites that insist that a higher purity wire is the best like 99.999 or 99.9999. What is your opinion about this?

- Dan

Dan, Trelja-- gotta' agree, Trelja's posts are excellent. Thanks for sharing Joe. I only "clean" the exposed portion of wires if there is apparent oxidation/corrosion, and then only the ends making contact.

As noted, I use 400 grit sandpaper or emery cloth, and then only when it's apparent that the contacts actually need cleaning. For lighter, routine cleaning, I use the contact cleaner sold by Sonic Frontiers, and following chemical cleaning, my system always seems to sound better.

It has finally (Duuuhhh) occurred to me that you are talking about polishing the whole wire (not just cleaning the contacts)? And, of course, that is an entirely different matter. Craig

Thanks again, Dan and Craig. I can think of no one on this site more knowledgeable than Garfish.

As far as wire purity goes, I have to admit that I also find myself falling into the trap of being drawn into a product which offered 6 - 9s (99.9999%) purity over one that did not. One thing that I will raise at this point is, are we really sure we are buying wire that is actually that pure?

I am sure that the wire manufacturers will jump right up, and come at me hot and heavy, but I recall a small wire manufacturer throwing down the gauntlet. He challenged any company advertising their wire's purity to be over 99.99% or 99.999%(I apologize for not remembering which one) to prove it. I don't know what carrot he dangled, but I don't think anyone stepped up to the plate.

His assertion was that a scientist let him know that the analysis(X Ray Diffraction or EDAX[also X Ray) used could do no better than the figure he was claiming. While I have run these types of tests(as well as ICP, flame spectroscopy, SEM, TEM), I am surely not an expert. I will say that I might side with this opinion. This type of equipment is not as hallowed as the real world thinks it is.

What I mean is that there are a lot of curious results that come out of them. We always joked about it. As an aside, one of our biggest laughs ever was at the expense of our useless PHD Analytical Chemist. He ran the Analytical Department, we only ran tests here and there. But, we were under the same director, and attended the same bi - weekly status meeting.

Anyway, one day he presented his results of his analysis on the cermet pencils(we mark substrates with them, as they don't burn out in even a 980 degree C furnace - but will above 1100 C). The X Ray Analysis said that the cermet pencil markings were 55% rhodium. Rhodium was the most expensive of the 8 precious metals at the time, probably still is. The pencils were $0.50. Well, we all fell off our chairs with laughter. However, this guy's pride and blind faith in his equipment was way over the top. He refused to back off this assertion.

Of course, being the joker I am, I proposed that we shut down as a company, order as many cermet pencils we could afford, and go into the precious metal reclamation business. A $0.50 investment would probably yield maybe an ounce of rhodium. At $7000/ounce at the time, we thought we could live off of that. Even the company's owner got involved, asked me to draw up a proposal. Guess you had to be there...

The point I am taking far too long to make is that like amps that feature 0.005% distortion, things sometimes look a lot better on paper.

If anyone is that interested in buying this ultra high purity wire, while we will get hosed, we don't have to get killed. AudioQuest FP-6, used in cables such as Midnight speaker cable used this kind of wire. They advertised something like 99.99997% pure, or is that FPC?(which was even higher). They claim their newer stuff is even much better, due to the Perfect Surface Copper. Just buy some Midnight(it's 10 gauge - and quite reasonable these days), and you should have all the wire you need to do a lot of jobs

I don't know... I use AQ Midnight on my woofers, and to be honest, I find the Coincident CST 1.0 I use to my mids/tweeters to be very much superior. Especially, when I switch them. Even my father, the ultimate electrician/technician/EE cynic had to admit that the two wires sounded different.

From personal experience, products from Audio Note are as good as things get. But, we are forced to judge them with our ears rather than our eyes. Kondo - san doesn't make things for gearheads, unless they like to brag about the 75 pounds of silver in an amplifier's transformers. If 4 - 9s purity is good enough for him, it's definitely good enough for me.

My thanks to him for the Audio Note solid silver RCA plugs I have. Fantastic.

Trelja - the manufacturer who challenged the audio community to prove the purity of their wire over 99.99% is Silver Audio

The rest of the story goes like this:
The shameful practice of claiming ridiculous and completely impossible levels of silver purity by various "high-end" audio cable companies has gone on long enough. Silver Audio formally challenges ANY high-end audio cable company claiming to use greater than 99.99% pure silver to PROVE their claim by making available, a notarized copy of their certification analysis including the name and location of the INDEPENDENT laboratory as well as the type of testing method that was used.

When we demanded proof from our FORMER vendor of their claim (to us) of "five-nines" pure (99.999%) silver, they were unable (and unwilling) to provide it. When another potential vendor claiming "six-nines" pure (99.9999%) stopped communicating with us after we demanded proof from them as well, that was when we became very suspicious that claims of six and even "seven-nines" (and still higher!) were nothing but blatant marketing fraud. In some cases, honest ignorance appears to be the reason behind some claims of ultra-high purity. In most cases however, desperation for a unique selling point is obviously the motivation!

In two years of dealing with scores of the same testing labs that certify metal purity for the aerospace and medical industries (where purity REALLY matters) we find over and over again the same result: There is NO testing method, not even ICP mass spectrometry, and most importantly, no clean room or handling procedure capable of reliably and repeatedly assaying any element beyond 99.99% pure. Even the silicon used in the semi-conductor industry (by some of the most critical and sensitive equipment in the world) cannot be assayed for purity beyond 99.99%! Some audio companies have, perhaps only naively, tested their metal only for gas impurities (oxygen) which is expressed in parts per million (ppm) and apparently tried to then express this figure as a percent of purity (by weight or volume?)! This conversion makes no sense and even if it did, the real contaminants of silver are not oxygen, but the trace elements of iron, copper, phosphorus and silicon!

Silver Audio does not purchase any lot of silver that does not test to 99.99% pure ("pure" silver is often less than 99.99%). Each lot is certified by an independent lab for ALL trace impurities by weight, DC resistance and ductility. The certification for each new lot is notarized and provided to Silver Audio and is available to anyone who requests it, though it is intended for our OEM customers who buy our wire. The only aspects of purity that we pay some attention to, since they MIGHT account for some performance difference, are the relative levels of silicon and copper. Otherwise, what really matters (and is measurable) is the method by which the wire is drawn and to what final temper. Silver Audio does use a very simple (but to our knowledge unique) trick in conjunction with well maintained, very high tolerance diamond dies to ensure an exceptionally smooth, dense, and clean final product. Otherwise, the lesson here is that what really matters is the cable design and how it is executed, not whether the conductors are 1/10,000 of one percent less pure than those of another brand of cable!