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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watdcsu!herbie
From: herbie@watdcsu.UUCP (Herb Chong [DCS])
Newsgroups: net.audio
Subject: Re: Hitachi super-pure cable
Message-ID: <1357@watdcsu.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 8-May-85 10:25:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: watdcsu.1357
Posted: Wed May  8 10:25:08 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 9-May-85 02:09:14 EDT
References: <659@charm.UUCP>
Reply-To: herbie@watdcsu.UUCP (Herb Chong [DCS])
Organization: U of Waterloo
Lines: 84
Summary: 

In article <659@charm.UUCP> prk@charm.UUCP (Paul Kolodner) writes:
>Well, a scientist who suspects that
>this new cable is hot stuff for hearing as well as purity
>would have done exactly what another netter suggested a
>few days ago:  do a double-blind test with a lot of subjects
>to see if humans can perceive the changes in the cable
>associated by its breathtaking purity, rather than advertise
>its electrical properties.  
stereo review or high fidelity did this a few years ago with zip cord
and expensive cables of various gauges.  their conclusion was that, to
the listening panel, perceived differences were not statistically
significant.  however, given their hardware setup, there could have
been other factors which would have masked the results.  specifically,
no matter how thick your speaker cables are, if the ones inside the box
are thin (22 Ga.), then there's not going to be a lot of difference for
anything less than 18 Ga.  if you run short lengths (10 ft.).  i run a
short length 10 Ga, but i also have 12 Ga cabling inside my speakers to
replace the 22 Ga original.

>The point of my
>message, however, is this:  It's easy to make a lot of
>fancy electrical measurements on inanimate objects like
>cables and speakers.  It's a lot harder to objectively
>quantify what meaning, if any, those measurements have, and
>it's irresponsible to run around quoting numbers if they're
>irrelevant or meaningless. 
this is true of all audio components to one degree or another.  the transducers
suffer from this problem the greatest.  no-one is completely sure what
the measurements mean audibly.  to different people, different levels
of flaws are acceptible.

>A recent case in point in my 
>life: I went to stereo store to by speakers and cables.
>The salesman told me enthusiatically that I should use
>gold-plated banana plugs rather than nickel because they
>have lower electrical resistivity.  Think: what effect could the
>difference in resistance between a micron of gold and a micron
>of nickel have on a circuit with an impedance of many ohms?
>Answer: zero. Period.  Salesmen are distinguished by their
>willingness to uncritically and enthusiastically repeat
>things they don't understand.  
they *DO* reduce resistance, but not by reducing bulk resistance.  contact
resistance is reduced because the gold contacts are essentially corrosion
proof.  of course, if you have very thin gold-plate or it's too soft, it 
can scrape off on the first use.  price is somewhat of a guide here.  in
phono circuits, there is also an appreciable contact capacitance which may
or may not affect the frequency response of your cartridge depending upon
the exact value and the sensitivity of the cartridge to changes in it's
load.

>If cupric oxide inclusions
>were the dominant source of scattering of charge carriers at
>room temperature, then I would concede that reducing their
>density might have a strong effect on usefulness of speaker
>cable.  But that's not the case.  Phonons dominate, accompanied
>by scattering by the boundaries between microcrystals (grain
>boundaries) and by other impurities.  50,000 clumps of CuO (size
>1 micron, shall we say?) per meter of wire of diameter
>of, say, 2mm,  works out to reasonably high purity, and there are
>other things in there besides oxygen!  
the limited amount of material science that i have taken shows that
there is a lot of impurities at crystal boundaries.  inclusions form at
temperatures that are above the melting point of copper.  they are
the nuclei that the crystals of pure copper coalesce around.  during the
final stages of crystalization, more impurities come out of solution
and tend to be at or near crystal boundaries.  (at least ironhas these
properities).

i think Phil was slightly mistaken when he said "inclusions".  the
technical data i have seen talks about reducing the number of
*crystals* in the cable.  a 1m interconnect is claimed to consist of
about 50 crystals of copper.  a typical interconnect would be on the
order of several hundred thousand to one million.  

what's a phonon?

Herb Chong...

I'm user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....

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