Although pure silver is a better conductor than pure copper, poor quality silver often sounds a lot worse than poor quality copper. Firstly, choose a very pure silver and make sure that the crystal structure is defined and not distorted by the mechanical processes used to form the strands. We generally prefer continuous cast silver of at least 5 nines pure, however I don’t believe purity of the silver (or copper) beyond 6 nines pure has any benefit.
General experimentation, listening tests, shows that a given diameter of silver or copper has a subjective “frequency response”. Unfortunately I’ve no technical explanation of why this appears to occur, except that the electromagnetic radial field structure that gives rise to skin effect within the conductor when a current flows, may be responsible.
The subjective “frequency response” of a conductor is tilted towards the low frequencies as the diameter increases. This is why certain diameters are chosen for single strand cables; i.e. for interconnects around 0.6 mm diameter for copper and 0.9 mm diameter for silver. I must emphasis that the dielectric surrounding the conductors, the material used for the outer jacket and exact crystal structure of the conductor’s influence the sound as well. Through subjective evaluation, I’ve established that when many single strand conductors of the SAME diameter are put together to form a multistrand cable,. the subjective frequency response is widened relative to the frequency response of the single strand. This would suggest that multistrand cables are therefore more preferable to single strand cables, However, I’ve not talked about the subjective “time response” of single or a multistrand cable.
Which means what exactly?
A: Unfortunately it appears that a single strand cable seems to “ring ” at a particular frequency (related to its diameter) and has a fast decay. Whereas multistrand cables on the other hand, again “rings” at a particular frequency (related to the diameter of the strands), but the ringing is much longer in duration. I believe that neither cable solution is correct, since the fast decay of single strands tends to lead to subjective comments like: tight, fast sound, but not rich or warm. Whereas a multistrand cable can often sound: warm, slow with some smearing. I must point out that copper is much easier to work with, since its subjective “frequency response” is wider than that of silver for comparable single strand conductors. That is why many silver cables appear to sound not quite right, sometimes they might be a little bright or coloured.
Dr. Richard Bews
LFD4U 