Are silver coated cables a bunch of hype?

I see that you had called Canare and spole to a tach there.

I recently posted my impresions of their newest cable at AR.Just was not a good source IC for my CDP.I reinserted a run of AQ Ruby and the problem was eliminated.

If it was COAX you were going to use look elsewhere for an IC and do not use COAX.

There are good Silver coated cables out there like Audience Au24 but they are truely expensive.I have read several opions on the coating Q and from what I gather is the thing that it does is minimise corrosion or the transfer for highs travel on the outter surface while the bass is mre torwards the center of the conductor.I believe in the former.

If you are thinking of going to Silver in any respect I would go with Solid Silver.There are some that are not going to cost a real lot,but I went with 47Labs OTA instead.Seems the purist philos. won out.If you are going to spend up to $600 on IC's and speaker cable it is the choice I would go with.

Other than that be prepared to do alot of mixing and matching to find what will work best in your system.

A cheapest route is Knu Koncepts.com which was pretty close to much more expensive Audioquest stuff.$43 for 10ft of speaker cale & 2 IC's.

Hope that helps,good luck.

Red, I may very well be wrong, but I believe that silver coated copper predates the use of teflon insulated wire.

Twl, you are correct, silver oxide is conductive. Copper oxide is a semiconductor(can be conductive or non - conductive, depending on circumstances). Semi - conductors almost never exhibit good conductivity.

The point of a wires insulators is to (1)keep the conductors from shorting & (2)protect the wire from the outside world. I would say that if a wire is not being protected, the manufacturer is not doing his job. Even if they are using a material which does not provide that protection because of sonic reasons, at today's prices, they more than owe it to their customers to insulate the insulator. Provide some means of protecting their wire and our investment.

Cardas recommends against silver. Check out his web site www.cardas.com, I forget if it was in the FAQ or "insights". I think the category was "construction".
Art

Hi Trelja - seems you are like an old buddy after I have been away from these forumns for so long. You may be right about the Teflon thing, but the thing I read was definitely talking about using silver purely to avoid corrosion of the copper due to interaction with the dialectric, not for any 'sound' reasons.

Red, I think I speak for a lot of us here when I say that I wish you came around more, like things used to be. That goes for you too, Bruce!

Upon thinking of your post, I am tending to agree with your premise. Teflon and copper would have no interaction with one another. However, I can see how the plasticizers(almost always pthalates) in the teflon tubing, added to make the insulation flexible, probably have an acidic, therefore corrosive effect.

Copper reacts readily with all manner of materials, and this reaction(corrosion) would definitely be detrimental in the long run. Now, I believe I finally understand the reason behind many copper cables deteriorating over time, most notably the wire used inside Legacy speakers exhibiting their notorious green degradation(copper sulfate?) despite being protected from the outside elements. The copper is being attacked from inside the insulation.

Silver coating on copper would provide a useful means of protection. Silver is one of the 8 precious metals, a main characteristic of this category being its members resistance to reacting with other compounds. So, I now see a potential long term benefit to silver coated copper. Those old engineers again get a tip of my hat. I think the cable world needs more material scientists designing products and less marketing/salespeople.

Now, I leave it to the cable producers(uuuggghhhh) to produce good sounding silver coated copper audio cables. While I admit to taking a step forward in this thread towards this material, I still maintain that the material is used mostly as a tool to sell a cable at a higher price/markup.