Silver wire speaker cables

[Lee Henley]

Morning all, Ive been playing around the last week with a pair of silver wired Audionote AN-K/SPe speakers, these are a wonderful speaker. Anyway I called up AN in the week who recommended that I biwired them and used AN speaker cable, the list price of the cable is £400 per mono metre, so to do 2.5m is gonna cost big dollars!

My current speaker cable is Kimber Monocle, a no slouch cable IMO. Ive done a bit of looking round the internet and there are quite a few silver wired cables to be had. Ive never owned silver wired speaker cables and was wondering if it was worth taking the plunge as they can be quite expensive and don't seem to pop up secondhand very often. Quite a few of the artisan manufacturers do offer a return policy but they are still quite expensive at a shade under £300

Any advice much appreciated

Lee

[Clive197]

It is no surprise that a manufacturer would recommend their own speaker cable and then tell you to Bi-Wire. But it's you who would have to dish out the spondooley. The real question would be....I know it will alter the sound but would it make it better?
I Bi-Wired my speakers because I could, being in the trade at the time it wasn't a huge expense. I do have my doubts about Bi-Wire as I could only hear the difference on some but not all speaker/wire combinations.

[Richard Kimber]

I have a pair of 6ft silver cables that I don't need, but I assume they're not long enough for you?

They're not for biwiring though.

- Richard.

[Effem]

Pure silver cables are expensive because . . . . . . pure silver is expensive. The "cheaper" silver cables are either recycled or jewellery grade silver and they sound very thin and 'bright'.

I see little point in bi-wiring unless you use different cables with the right attributes for separate bass and treble rendition, so fit only a single run from amp to speakers and just a short jumper link across the terminals on the speaker - it amounts to exactly the same as bi-wring sonically without the expense.

Audio Note cables are soft annealed pure silver which my experience says sounds better than hard annealed cables do.