Funniest snake oil theories

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I would not think that there would be a significant or necessarily an audible difference between 1 meter interconnects, but I heard the difference 40 years ago....
...I measured the thd and IM down to about 0.001% and found nothing...
The engineer in me says when a difference is undeniably heard, there should be measurable difference. The problem is probably that there is nobody with enough curiosity, scientist attitude and resources to really nail and measure the difference. Most audio designer stop being inquisitive once immediate problem at hand is solved due to various reasons. There could be others we know nothing about who do have valid measurement but choose to keep it undisclosed to keep the "mistique air", charge obscene profit, make up some snake oil pseudo science and throw competitor research into blind alleys.

I'm about 20 years your junior John, but my hearing is no longer what it was decades ago. It is close to impossible for people like me to gain anything from research on this without help from others unquestionably able to discern the difference where expectation bias, hearing skill, psychoacoustics and other perception related influence easily get in the way. I just wish I get to see someone crack the tough nut, discover what to measure and clear the pseudo science off the table.

I kind of hope this silver-copper wire case progress similarly to the Lavardin's and Peufeu's so called "memory distortion" which in contrast, did show measurements. Many found the findings inconclusive and publication on the subject was dormant for years. Recently however, Jan Didden brought the Audio Power Amplfiers - towards inherently linear amplifiers book by Arto Kolinummi to my attention about which he posted :
This aspect is also an important result from Arto Kolinummi's study. After attacking each stage separately and greatly improving its inherent linearity, he came to the point where he no longer needed global feedback for ppm distortion. And attention to the thermal memory issues was an important part.

Jan
 
john curl said:
The paragraph from Audio Note makes more sense to me than anything anyone else recently commenting on differences between silver and copper conductors.
That note can only have been written by someone with a stronger grasp of chemistry than electricity. An audio interconnect is a trivial potential divider, with a very small series element and a very large shunt element. One of those would need to be seriously nonlinear in order to muck up the signal, yet we know that both are very linear even in much more sensitive applications. Hence we can be sure that the claims are false, however fervently and sincerely people believe them.

kaputt said:
Silver is used in high frequency equipment, isn't it?
Yes, because at VHF and above the slightly better conductivity of silver gives slightly lower losses. In critical applications every little helps. Audio is not a critical application, and frequencies are 4 orders of magnitude smaller, so silver does not help.

traderbam said:
It is a fact that silver and copper are atomically quite different and Audio Note suspects their oxide properties matter and are different. So it is not absurd to entertain the idea that silver wiring sounds different to copper. I haven't listened to silver wire so I can't say.
It is absurd. Silver and copper are both metals; both have plenty of free electrons to form a current.

Max Headroom said:
7% is significant.
No it isn't.

Is the method of conduction exactly the same ?.....evidently not.
What is this evident difference? Both are normal metallic conductors.

So do copper and silver conductors transmit all audio frequencies at the same amplitude, at least relative to themselves?
Does the conductivity difference between copper and silver introduce phase shifts, in silver plated copper conductors?
Yes (whatever you mean by that). No.

scott wurcer said:
Why does time keep getting wasted on this nonsense?
Because, for some psychological reason which I cannot fathom, people want it to be true. They think if they wish hard enough it will become true.

globalplayer said:
Looks like silver has worse group delay.

Copper vs Silver...MEASURED (surprising) | Head-Fi.org
I note that the difference is seen around 50Hz and that the tester says
. . . I looked at the group delay . . I have no idea what group delay is.
Fortunately Steve Eddy pops up there to bring them all down to earth. I think we can safely ignore those results.
 
Magnetic chart.png

Dan.
 
I bought this silver wire connecting cable in Tokyo for about $30 in 1978, and it was just to buy something for my hi fi that I didn't have in California. This was when cables were just starting to be considered important. This cable appeared to be very well made with really nice RCA connectors (about the best I have ever had) and while $30 was a lot for a cable at the time, I wanted a souvenir of my trip, perhaps to show my friends how 'crazy' the Japanese were about audio at the time. I took it home, plugged it in and found that it sounded bright, even harsh! I measured the thd and IM down to about 0.001% and found nothing.

Although I have no personal experience I read this a lot that silver will sound more bright.
 
The chart you attach show ~1.6 x 10^-5 difference in relative susceptibility, the same as ~0.0016% difference of relative permeability between silver and copper. What is the point you are making Dan? Or did I make a mistake somewhere?
I'm saying that there is another difference in addition to difference in conductivity.
I have noted sound difference according wire material and wire direction in previous experiments.
XRK971 has noted change in sound according to 2nd/3rd harmonic ratio at around -100dB level....way below 'accepted' distortion sensitivity.

Dan.
 
I would not think that there would be a significant or necessarily an audible difference between 1 meter interconnects, but I heard the difference 40 years ago.

I bought this silver wire connecting cable in Tokyo for about $30 in 1978, and it was just to buy something for my hi fi that I didn't have in California. This was when cables were just starting to be considered important. This cable appeared to be very well made with really nice RCA connectors (about the best I have ever had) and while $30 was a lot for a cable at the time, I wanted a souvenir of my trip, perhaps to show my friends how 'crazy' the Japanese were about audio at the time. I took it home, plugged it in and found that it sounded bright, even harsh! I measured the thd and IM down to about 0.001% and found nothing. So I gave it to a local hi end dealer to try at their premises and they found the same thing. I kept it around and finally used it as the output cable for a NAK 550 where its 'brightness' was balanced with the NAK's character. Over the years, it seemed to sound smoother. Was it my ears? Or was it break-in? Twenty years later my friend and later CTC Blowtorch partner found that most silver wire did indeed sound too 'bright', even harsh, BUT he found a solution: He found a brand of silver wire, when 'burned in for days or weeks' could sound better than any copper or even any other silver wire that he could find, and he took wire differences very seriously. He finally convinced me to try some of this wire, when rewiring my Vendetta preamps during an upgrade, and we decided to make the CTC Blowtorch preamps with it exclusively. My own CTC Blowtorch is made with this wire, and it does sound wonderful, better than any other product I have been associated with. Then 10 years ago, after Bob Crump unexpectedly died, he left me to wire 5 Blowtorches or to give back the $50,000 that the Japanese had put up as a deposit. What to do? I TRIED to get the right silver wire, but it was not available, so I tried to replace it with the best copper hookup wire that I could find, and I wired the 5 Blowtorch preamps with it. Then I compared a copper wire based preamp with a silver wire based unit (all else being equal) and I found that the copper ones did indeed sound 'softer' and perhaps preferred by some people, but not as 'clear' sounding unfortunately. Now, and for the last 12 years I have had no access to the 'silver' wire that I like, but that does not mean that I am happy with the situation, I just have to live with it. One must TRY and be open to hearing differences, if one is to be successful in audio design. Undergraduate engineering-physics is not enough.

I have used a handful of interconnects myself. MIT, Randall Research, Monster Cable, Alpha Cote, Magnan, and some other Japanese brands. All these sounded different. I settled to stay with my MIT 330 and MIT 330 Shotguns for decades before finally developing my own. Even in the process of development, there were two designs that sounded different but had almost the same impedance. One sounded more accurate, the other had a very seductive sonic quality. I wanted a second opinion so I asked another audiophile to listen to both and tell me what he thought. The feedback was similar to my findings, but he preferred the one with the seductive sonic quality. He is also the one that recommended connectors to me. I made the decision to go with fidelity. It is still working fine, but the next version is going to need a boost in the frequency/impedance below 40 Hz.
 
The engineer in me says when a difference is undeniably heard, there should be measurable difference. The problem is probably that there is nobody with enough curiosity, scientist attitude and resources to really nail and measure the difference. Most audio designer stop being inquisitive once immediate problem at hand is solved due to various reasons. There could be others we know nothing about who do have valid measurement but choose to keep it undisclosed to keep the "mistique air", charge obscene profit, make up some snake oil pseudo science and throw competitor research into blind alleys.



I'm about 20 years your junior John, but my hearing is no longer what it was decades ago. It is close to impossible for people like me to gain anything from research on this without help from others unquestionably able to discern the difference where expectation bias, hearing skill, psychoacoustics and other perception related influence easily get in the way. I just wish I get to see someone crack the tough nut, discover what to measure and clear the pseudo science off the table.



I kind of hope this silver-copper wire case progress similarly to the Lavardin's and Peufeu's so called "memory distortion" which in contrast, did show measurements. Many found the findings inconclusive and publication on the subject was dormant for years. Recently however, Jan Didden brought the Audio Power Amplfiers - towards inherently linear amplifiers book by Arto Kolinummi to my attention about which he posted :

Actually some research had been done. More than a decade ago I became aware of an OCOS report that talked about impedance curve of cable vs impedance curve of device input. They mentioned that a better match will provide cleaner and more accurate sound with better detail. I found that to be true, but when someone mentioned my cables did not sound best with other amplifiers, I did some research and found that the input impedance curve of amplifiers may not be the same. But most of the newer designs seem to be more in line with each other.

As personal interest, I do intent to find a way to identify performance differences. But it does take time.
 
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