Braided silver cables

[Hydesg]

Hi guys, i am planning to upgrade my cardas twin link to a pair of 28 strand braided speaker cables in the following link. What are your thoughts on such cables and does the length of the speaker cables matter ?
http://m.ebay.com.sg/itm/171304389347?_mwBanner=1

[Andrei]

"Carefully braided 28 strands(!) of 6N solid silver wire AWG28 (0.33mm diameter) per channel "

This does not make sense to me. Is the sum of the stands AWG28 or is each strand AWG28?
If is is the sum then each strand is incredibly thin. Not only that but a total of AWG28 is very little gauge for speaker wire. That is what one would expect for interconnects. In fact I have made silver interconnects with AWG24.

If each strand is AWG28 then I can believe it even less. Silver is expensive and the total would be about AWG13. Not only that but it is claimed to be 6nines pure. My understanding this is so difficult and expensive your cables should be costing north of £10,000.00.

I like silver cables but in this instance I would investigate further.

[brian2957]

Yes , I agree Andrei . As you say , silver is very expensive and these do seem a bit on the cheap side for the amount of silver they claim to contain . One of the problems with pure silver cables is the quality of silver used , which has to be 99.99% pure for audio purposes . The second is that it is expensive and so there's never enough of it used in cheaper pure silver audio cables , resulting in ' thin ' sound lacking in weight in the midrange and the bass . I would also be investigating these cables further .
I've tried quite a few silver cables and have always gone back to good quality copper interconnects and speaker cables .

[Reffc]

Dreadful geometry and use of materials; high capacitance, thinner wires very prone to breakage at connections and especially to hydrogen sulphide tarnishing (and hence fracture at that gauge). The use of silver threaded loosely into PTFE tubes is also bad practice. Here I don't really care what is fashionable or what others use. The facts are that this specific mix of materials gives rise to triboelectric charge plus the variable nature of the loosely contacting dielectric may have an effect on signal propagation. In other words, you'd have to go some to come up with a poorer design for a speaker cable IMHO. A good quality copper multistrand is all that's really called for for a decent loudspeaker cable.

In theory the "golden ratio" method of stranding is the most superior but for most domestic cable lengths you'd be hard pushed to justify the additional cost. Silver makes for a thinner conductor, not a better "sounding" one (whatever that means as it has no technical merit as a description applied to conductors in this instance). Differences in SQ can be attributable to differing reactions with dielectrics and the effects on signal propagation. In general, it is very easy to apply SQ aspects to speaker cables that may not exist or where they do, are down to geometry/dielectrics. The signal integrity has to be considered in terms of the total circuit between amplifier to speaker and back again (people forget this) and just how much copper do you think that the signal travels through considering the voicecoils? My advice: stick to a decent quality copper cable using a sensible geometry that doesn't have a high reactance and invest the money elsewhere if looking for improvements.

[YNWaN]

I would second the comments made above. The biggest problem with silver speaker cables is that the inherent cost of the material means that poorer purity material is often used and/or very much less of it is used than if copper were used. Either of these aspects means that the performance will be significantly altered and, in my experience, compromised. Frankly, you are better of with good quality multi-stand copper cable of a generous cross section (4mm for example) - such a cable made from equal purity silver would be exceedingly expensive (and those that are are indeed very expensive indeed).

The cables linked to are well photographed and look suitably exotic echoing the construction of Kimber cables. However, their diameter is largely a reflection of the amount of insulation used and the actual amount of conducting metal seems quite small.