Highly Polished wire????


Here's one for all those Mat Science gurus..
OK we have all read this... "polished to a mirror finish to further reduced surface impurities.... Polished with what?

Seems like the cure worse than the disease? Wouldn't you introduce more impurities by polishing with a foreign substance. What's the secret formula to remove "impurities" without introducing new ones???

Is it just marketing hype?

- Dan
dan2112
Hmmm Interesting... Also from Silver Audio's website..

"Silver Audio is therefore thrilled to offer the solder-less, TopLine WBT locking RCA connector as an option for the 4.0s and 6.0s. WBT is universally regarded as the Rolls Royce of Audio connectors and their model 0108 represents the top of their line. This cost-no-object connector features the most powerful locking mechanism in the business and is precision machined in West Germany to exacting tolerances of <2/100 mm! The base metal is an extremely conductive, proprietary alloy based on over 99.996% pure copper....."

Maybe copper can be more than 99.99% pure.
Bwhite and Dan, I thank you profusely for your research.

It's no wonder that it was Silver Audio was the company I was referring to, without referring to them. They are one of my favorite audio cable manufacturers, and I now remember reading this discourse in a past visit to their website.

So there, a no BS statement on wire purity. From a genuine guy, Max. I agree, certifying purity of better than 4 - 9s is either a company who is misinformed, or just following along with others touting 6 - 9s to keep up with the Joneses.

It seems as if Audio Note and Silver Audio are both in agreement in their assertion that drawing the wire is the critical step. I would still be sure to use a suitable organic solvent, to ensure removal of any contaminants along the lines of oil from ones fingers, the machinery, or the like.

If I can toot the horn of a manufacturer, I must say that in my experience and opinion, Silver Audio's cables are as fine as I have encountered. I have personally come across their Silver Bullet and Hyacinth interconnects, and recommend both to anyone who is interested in finding out what really good silver cables sound like. Liquid, detailed, natural. I would love to pick up their Symphony speaker cables, but a power amp is a bigger need for me right now.

Couple of thoughts
Trelja I think that the ones that normally claim so much digits are not versed in significant figures and over use their calculators.....
Seems that sometimes a certain methodology is discussed here this goes to extents where sometimes it looses contact with reality an example here you can get polishing materials that they reduce their "grit" as you use them like polishing paste so you end up with way better finish than the original range might have suggested.
As for sanding paper, I think it´s pretty much widely known that 180 grit provides way lesser a finish than say 400 or 600. Well if you do your homework you can find in automotive refinish supply stores grit 1000 or even 1200 if interested and get a better finish yet or you can go the polishing paste route as well.
And if polishing is such an imperfect process not worth doing just imagine how they can get the polished mirrors for telescopes that provide so interesting images of far distant objects, doesn´t that ring a bell?
Regards
I worked with one of the world leading companies that produced semi conducters for capacitors. I personally worked on and ran the vacuume chamber, computer system, and electron beams that cast the metal and removed the impurites.

It used four electron beams that would melt the metal. This was done at such a high tempature that it would vaporize all the impurities and then the vacuume chamber would pull them away while they were in gas form.

The vacuume chamber and electron beams alone were a 60 million dollar set up. That doesnt include the room full of tranformers, the targeting system in which to control the electron beams, or the all the other equipment that filled the room to support this system. I was told that we had one of the most advanced systems in the world.

Our purity didnt get close to what is claimed above. You have to understand that they system used to remove the impurities also, in a small degree, adds other into it. If we melted to quickly you would get an excess build up of oxygen and carbon and could never fully remove them from the metal.

I would be very interested to know what casting process is used to make the silver for silver wire.