What Happened to My Monster Cable?

[mp9]

just checked mine and one org. monster cable 8' pair cut from a spool bought at the home depot 19 years ago is showing more of that greenish oxidation than the other of the same age from a 25' packaged pair. my monsters are not even close to being as bad as the o.p.'s pair.
i don't really care because i have a 20' length of clear and white new edition kimber 8tc to replace the monster as soon as i build a horn i like for my current favorite hi eff. wb drivers. there is a big difference in the copper color of the kimber 8tc clear wires than the old monster.

[SY]

Originally posted by QSerraTico_Tico



Yeah right. Ironically it most frequently occurs with the transparent PVC.

Bingo. Transparent PVC is formulated differently and is far more corrosive to copper. It's accelerated by UV (there's a lot of extra UV stabilizer in there, but transparent is transparent) and atmospheric conditions. PVC with lots of filler and low stabilizer package is usually fine for the long term.

[unclejed613]

at work i use a 14ga SVT cable i "rescued" from a power cord that was on a NERTSed piece of equipment (Not Economically Repairable This Shop... NERTS) as a cable for my dummy loads. why pay for speaker cables when you can get them for free? the monster cable i've seen recently looks like 10 or 12 ga wire, but the wires have a plastic core, and when stripped and tinned are only 18ga worth of wire spread out on the plastic core. i think that may be some of their cheaper cable. sure that might act like 10 or 12 ga wire at higher frequencies due to skin effect, but at lower frequencies, it's going to act like 18 ga wire.

the discoloration could be from a combination of things, moisture absorption of the plastic, air absorption of the plastic, off-gassing of the plastic as a decomposition byproduct, and acids in the air (such as NO3 and SO3 radicals that are present in city air) it could be anything from one, to all of the above.

[AuroraB]

Designed by Monster so that after some time you'd have to buy another Monster
- at monstrous prices

[lgreen]

I don't use fancy cable anymore, but I do have some left over from those days. I have massive pair of DIY speaker cable to biamp my speakers.

I got this back in the '80s when you needed MC to be cool! And a Camero! And Varnet sunglasses! And a jean jacket!

I called MC customer service. All their cables have a lifetime guarantee. I am to ship it back and get a new set for free.

Have to pay shipping of course, but given the high price of this cable it will be totally worth it. Where did I put my Ocean Pacific shorts?

[forr]

It would be interesting to compare the oxidised cable with a non-oxidised one having the same initial specs from the electrical point of view.
Maybe the first could better at high frequencies because behaving somewhat like Litz wire... If ugly to see but nice to hear, you should keep it.

[lgreen]

Just to finish up my situation.

I called the Monster Cable "service" number on their website. They immediately said that the goo was most likely oxidation of the cables (no kidding) please send them back for a full replacement since every Monster Cable has lifetime warranty. They apparently get this all the time regarding their older cables.

Back went the cable from 1985 (25 or 50 feet, I forget). About 2 weeks later no response. Called them, they apologized and said that they are out of stock and waiting for the replacement cable to arrive; but with my permission they will send a newer version, still 12 gauge but newer "geometry" (?). I said OK. 2 Days later in comes a massive 100 foot spool wire- OMC BIG-100. A search indicates the web price is $89 or higher.

So there you have it. You can be critical of MC but they certainly do have good customer service.

[unclejed613]

i once worked at a stereo shop in NC. we had bought a case of dual RCA cables from Sony. they were some of Sony's low capacitance phono cables, and thought they might be useful, since low capacitance cables were required for the then somewhat-popular Quad encoded records, which had a 38khz (i think) subcarrier encoded on the disk, and low cap cables were required to present as little loss to the subcarrier info as possible. we got these cables at a bargain basement price, and as time went by, we found out why. it seemed that the right channel cables had a tendency to get noisy and eventually short. we couldn't figure out why only the right channel cables were doing this. it didn't make sense. so i decided to find out where the cables were shorting, and maybe i could then figure out why. so i took a cable that was shorted, and as with most intermittent or bad cables it had an area just above the connector where the cable felt limp. so i cut it open right there, and a bunch of red powder poured out., then i cut open the left side to find out why it hadn't failed. in these cable sets Sony used a plastic foam insulation on the inner wires. the white (no colorant added) insulation was still strong and pliable, the red coloring in the insulation on the right had caused a chemical reaction that caused the plastic foam to crumble into red dust. if you flexed the cable enough you could make the whole inner insulation of the cable crumble and pull out the inner bare copper wire... since sony had sold the cables as a "discontinued item" we couldn't return them for credit, and now had a box of single channel cables with matching shorting plugs.

[unclejed613]

as far as the insulation in some cables turning the copper green, it's not chlorine being released from the plastic (chlorine forms very strong bonds with carbon, that only very high temperatures can break down) but it might be acids released as the polymer chains break down. some of these acids might be in the form of organic chlorates, which as they decompose will give off oxygen (leaving the chlorine again where it would rather be, bonded to the carbon atoms).

[lgreen]

I've got some very old lamp cord, one leg is copper and the other is a different metal- its silver colored.

- why do they make the conductors out of different stuff?
- I use is in my garage with cruddy speakers. I did notice the same goo on the copper wire but not on the others. Seems like this happens more that I thought it did.