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Craziest Speaker Cable Ever

Konteebos

Surfing on the lake of fire
No, I'm not referring to some American solid silver hyperlitz 8" diameter stuff at £15000 per foot, but to a colleague's experiment some time in the 1980's. At that time the linear crystal craze was in full spate, my colleague decided to go one better and have monocrystal speaker cables. For this he used plastic tubes filled with mercury (he worked in a large laboratory and had access). They were not a great success, the cables had an impedance of around 2ohms, sounded "crap" and even worse the mercury started to leak through the plastic.
 
Eek indeed - my wife used to work with a doctor who had a large barometer in his hall. This was knocked off the wall and broke spilling mercury onto the carpet. As the owner was a doctor and knew something of how dangerous mercury is he called in a professional industrial cleaning company to remove the mercury. The bill, which was covered by his household insurance, came to several thousand pounds.
 
My missus is a Registered Midwife, the amount of times I've discovered broken mercury thermometers in drawers or her handbag , etc is unreal. She once 'borrowed' one of my longstanding favorite ( expensive ) pens a while ago and left it in her bag, unfortunately for me some mercury got to it and it just fell apart !
I work on Aircraft and any contamination or spillage of mercury is a major mopping up and damage limitation operation as it just loves to eat Aluminium, nasty stuff and highly Toxic too i believe.
 
We used to take it out of it bottles and 'chase' it around the benches in the chemistry labs at school - great fun - suppose I should be dead by now.

Paul
 
I remember jiggling some of it about in the palm of my hand. We never had a warning by the teacher not to.

Oh for the days before the Health and Safety Executive.
 
A neighbour of mine used to work in a multi story laboratory building. On the top floor one day, several litres of the stuff 'escaped' from a glass container. On the lower floors for some weeks after, it rained droplets of mercury. Funny thing was though, in the '70s, no-one really took much notice.
 
"Funny thing was though, in the '70s, no-one really took much notice"...
Quite right too. I have two heads, webbed feet and am slightly green - nobody takes much notice.
 
Hi Konteebos,

I am not particularly sure, but assume the leaking "cables" you refer to were NOT cooled to any temperature below 234.3 K (I'm confident you remember Système Internationale!). So very very likely the so called single crystal wasn't crystalline at all. Perhaps the hoses could have been called single liquid connects.
Your story convinces me all the more that the whole cable abra-cadabra does very funny things quite a few hifi-loving minds.
Nice anecdote anyway! :rolleyes:
 
Got all the mercury removed from my mouth 6 months ago.

Now I dare to smile while listening before the plethora of black aluminium boxes again.

Look out! There have been numerous reports from people who have lost all their black boxes... Must be the mercury in their mounths. Propably, I thinketh. :rolleyes:


Oz
 
I was in the Stage Crew at school. The main lighting used mercury switches (can't remember why) in glass cases.

When one of them blew, there would be mercury floating around the lighting desks for weeks. Who cared? At worst, you just let it float. At best, you scooped it onto the floor out of the way.

Mick (three mouths, four arms, numerous ex wives and too many kids)
 
My chemistry prof. would pour powdered sulfur on spilled mecury, let it sit for a few minutes and then would be able to sweep it up. Of course this means keeping a supply of sulfur on hand with your mercury.
 
I've even read somewhere that rich people had it in the swimming pole intead of water. At least one will not drown...

JohanR
 
Our chem teacher used mercury on open days as a demo to taunt the biologists - it could be made to (superficially) meet some of the definitions of a living thing:

put a blob of mercury in a shallow bath of something acid (clear) add something or other orange crystals nearby (an inch maybe). The mercury blob will move down the concentration gradient towards the crystal, envelop it, convert it to something else, and sometimes the reaction will make it split. Hence it is motile, ingests, excretes and replicates. He called it (a 'him') Oscar. Amazing to watch (at least for snotty kids). Anyone know the chemicals involved?
 
I remember our chemistry teacher demonstrating how to dilute sulphuric acid . He dripped the sulphuric acid into a container of water, very slowly. After the demo, he warned us that to do it any faster would result in an explosion.

The following week, he was ill. The biology teacher stepped into the breach. " I am going to demonstrate how to dilute sulphuric acid" He postiioned the water tank, and poured the acid in as fast as it would come out of the bottle.

He was somewhat bemused when he turned around and saw 30 kids cowering under their desks.

Rod
 


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