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Are silver coated cables a bunch of hype?

I'm looking to upgrade some cables (digital coax/comp. video), and I've seen recomendations re: Canare. Originally I looked into a few silver coated copper cables. I spoke to a tech at Canare cable and he said none of their cables are silver coated, and that silver made no difference when it came to signal transfer. Is a good quality copper cable as good or better than a silver coated cable? Does the silver coated copper have a cheaper copper grade/purity to cut cost when adding silver? Thank You, Chrisrn.
chrisrn
artmaltman
769 posts
 
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
redkiwi
1,092 posts
 
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.
trelja
3,226 posts
 
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.
hearhere
55 posts
 
It was asserted in this thread that silver-plating will cause the high frequencies to travel faster than the lows, and thus smear out the signal when it arrives at its destination. Like a lot of things, this sounds good at first inspection, but let's see . . .

You're really talking about something called group delay here. I haven't looked up the propagation velocities for cable, but let's make some really, really outlandish assumptions and see how it works. We'll have the 20kHz signals travel at lightspeed (can't get much faster than that!), and the 20Hz signals at just 10% of that speed. For a 10 meter cable (again, several times beyond ordinary), it'll take the 20kHz signal about 33 nanoseconds to make the trip; in this exagerated example, the 20 Hz signal takes about 330 nanoseconds. Now, a 20 kHz signal has a period of 50 microseconds, so the 300 nanoseconds late arrival of the low frequency signal corresponds to less than a 2.5 degree phase shift in the 20 kHz signal! This is virtually guaranteed to be inaudible.

Going to real-world numbers reduces the phase shift to maybe 0.1 degree. Unless your amplifier is in one county and your speakers in the next, group delay in cables is not an issue. Love silver-plated cables or hate'em, phase/group delay is not the cause.
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