Thanks Guys
My original link didnt work so here it is
http://www.venhaus1.com/diysilverinterconnects.html
My investigating has revealed some answers!
single wire,as small guage as you dare!
http://www.soundscapeav.com/cable_ar.html
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/viewpoint/1299/aachapter5.htm
construction
alternative:
http://www.soundstage.com/synergize/synergize021998.htm
(with silver not magnet wire)
http://www.laventure.net/tourist/cables.htm
"Quote" Construction:
"I basically followed Chris' recipe with a few alterations: used cotton rope instead of 1/4" Teflon tube and bought bare silver and insulated it myself. Threading the silver wire through the Teflon tube is probably the most difficult part of this job. If you don't want to fool with this part, then get silver wire that is already insulated. Its really a time vs. money tradeoff. To get a 24" interconnect, you need to start with about 39" of silver wire and 36" of Teflon tubing. How you cut the wire and the tubing also makes a difference in how easily you can thread the wire. If you use wire cutters or scissors, you will have a hard time. Both will "pinch" the wire and the tubing. Pinching the wire will leave behind a burr on it that will snag as it goes through the tubing and the openings on the tubing itself will be pinched off. Instead, use a sharp exacto razor knife. The knife will make short work of both the wire and the tubing, and will not damage the end of either. Note: If you plan on making interconnects longer than 24" in length, you may need to purchase silver wire that is already insulated. The problem is that the longer your interconnect is, the more difficult it becomes to thread the fine wire through the Teflon tubing. I had difficulty threading much more than three feet at a time - enough for a two foot interconnect. Also, you will use up your new wire faster than you think: it takes nearly 40 inches of silver wire to wrap around a 24 inch length of cotton rope if you space your "wraps" about 1 inch apart. Then you need to use another 40 inches for the second conductor. Now you have a single interconnect, but they are usually used in pairs, so you are looking at approximately 13 feet of silver wire per 24 inch pair of interconnects. Thus, one 25-foot spool of pre-insulated will yield 2 pairs of 24 inch interconnects.
First, place some hobby oil in the end of the Teflon tube. If you simply touch the end of the tubing to a drop of the oil, it will wick in all by itself. Put about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch of oil into the tube. This makes inserting the wire MUCH easier (trust me on this one!). 30 gauge wire is pretty thin stuff, and without the oil, you will surely kink and bend the wire and not be able to thread more than 5 inches of it into the tube. If you don't believe me, just try this without the oil and you'll see ;-). Thread one length of wire into each of the lengths of tubing that you have cut - these are your conductors. Next, its time to wind them onto your cotton rope.
Before you cut your rope, be sure to wrap it in tape, then cut through the middle of your tape. This will keep the rope from fraying and becoming hard to handle. I found it helpful to use a ruler and a sharpie marker and mark off one-inch intervals along the rope. You will use these marks as you wrap your first conductor around the rope to help maintain even spacing of the two conductors - an important part to achieving the low capacitance of the design. Begin by using a thin strip of masking tape to secure one end of the first insulated wire to one end of the rope. Then, start winding the wire around the rope so that you "hit" each of your one inch marks. When you get to the end, use another thin strip of masking tape to hold the wire in place - you don't want it to unravel now that you've wound it around the rope.. Do the same thing with your second insulated wire, but this time, you want to wind it so that it stays in the middle of one inch space created by winding the first insulated wire. The idea is that the two insulated wires should always remain 1/2" away from one another, thus never crossing over or touching one another. When you have completely wound both silver conductors around the cord, its time to use the Teflon plumbers tape to wrap the entire thing. Start at one end and be sure to overlap your spirals of Teflon tape to hold the conductors firmly in place. I usually wrap the rope with the conductors in place once in one direction (left to right) and then back again to where I started (right to left). This results in two good coverings for the rope and keeps things from moving around on you. Remove the little bits of making tape you used to hold the ends in place and go over the ends of the cord a few extra times with the Teflon tape to provide enough surface to insert into the RCA plug. You're most of the way there...
Before you get your soldering iron all warmed up, make sure you've done two things: 1) be sure to mark which conductor is which, you don't want to mix these up and short the output of your CD player (an ohm meter is an excellent tool to make sure you don't mix things up...) and 2) thread the barrel of the RCA terminal onto your new interconnect BEFORE you start soldering (duh! see the last picture above!). Its actually impossible to get the barrel back onto the terminal once you've made both solder connections, so do this part FIRST! It may also be necessary to shorten the wire and teflon tube if it overhangs the end of your cotton rope. To do this, gently score the entire circumerence of the teflon insulating tubing with your razor knife. Don't cut all of the way through it as this will also cut your conductor and then it will need to be replaced. Once the tubing is scored, use your thumbnail to separate it, then cut your conductor to the necessary length.
Next, make your solder connections and pinch the tabs of the RCA plug around the rope (not the wire!) with a pair of pliers. The last step is to wrap your solder connection with the same teflon tape to make sure that they are insulated and have no chance of wire or solder from the center pin contacting the outer barell of the connector. When everything is neat and tidy, close up the RCA plugs. You're done! All in all, it takes about 45 minutes to make each 24" pair of interconnects.
Final Cost:
I have many many, many pairs of interconnects. I made enough for my own set-up, and have given several sets away to friends and family members who know enough to appreciate their qualities. While the total materials cost is fairly high (though still less than the cost of a single high end pair of interconnects!), the individual cost works out to less than $25 plus an hour of time for each pair of 24" interconnects. Certainly more expensive than the cheap crap that came with your CD player, but also far less expensive than ANY other medium to high performance interconnect available today. For the cost of a one meter pair of high end interconnects, I wired my entire rig (and I have a lot of wires!).
The primary determining factor for cost is the specific RCA connector that you choose. Don't be cheap here (probably $5 each is the lower limit that I would set). I don't really see the need to spend $60 on a pair of them, but hey, its your money...
Performance:
Well, I was duly impressed when I first replaced the stock RCA cords that came with my CD player with Monster M950i cables. I wondered just how much of a difference I would hear with these new cables. The differences were not subtle at all. First, I had to recalibrate the channel levels for my home theater setup. The silver interconnects made the whole system much louder. The silver interconnect was very similar to the Monster one in terms of bass, but the treble had improved dramatically. Many people call silver wires "bright" or some other adjective that indicates the treble is too loud. I don't find silver wire bright at all, to me, it sounds great! Switching back and forth between my DIY silver ICs and the Monsters (after balancing their levels with my SPL meter) was clearly different (my CD player has 2 outputs, so switching is literally as quick and easy as a button press on the remote control). Switching from my new silver wires to the M950i left the music sounding dull and lifeless. Switching back to the silver wires presented a wider sound stage, smoother and cleaner treble, and an overall more enjoyable experience.
Now some people will claim that you will not be able to hear a 2% improvement in conductivity rates, or that wires don't matter. I used to be one of these people until I tried this myself! Your results, however, will most certainly depend upon the type of equipment you are using. If you have an inexpensive rack unit (< $300) that you bought at Circuit City a few years ago, you are not very likely to hear much difference. Why? Because the overall quality and resolution of the system is not high enough to reveal this difference (a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link...). If you have separate components that you hand selected at various high end audio shops, the differences should be readily apparent. I have an Adcom GCD 700 CD player, a Marantz AV-9000 preamp, Marantz MA500 monoblock amps, and Atlantic Technology System 350THX speakers. Certainly not "top of the line", but in all ways superior to anything sold in Circuit City, Best Buy, or any other "mall" store.
Measurements:
There are really only three measurements that can be readily made on a cable. The table below is a comparison of resistance, capacitance, and inductance measurements among three RCA cables: the standard freebie that comes with your CD or DVD player, the $100 per 1/2 meter Monster M950i interconnect, and my own $25 per 1/2 meter DIY silver interconnects. The goal with designing any type of audio signal wire is to transmit and preserve, as closely as possible, the original signal. Therefore, minimizing each of these three measurements will result in a wire that interferes with the original signal the least - at least this is what one would hope for. In reality, it is sometimes difficult to correlate physical measurement with what we hear. So with that in mind, here are my measurements - for what they are worth...
Comparison
Resistance
Capacitance
Inductance
Standard
Freebie Center pin: 0.319 ohm
Outer sleeve: 0.356 ohm
Between conductors: 5.5 Megaohm Center Pin: 36uF
Outer Sleeve:80uF
Between Conductors 344pF Center pin: 0.3uH
Outer sleeve: 3.3uH
Between conductors: 72.4H
Monster
M950i Center pin: 0.051 ohm
Outer sleeve: 0.051 ohm
Between conductors: not measurable Center Pin: 254uF
Outer Sleeve: 160uF
Between Conductors: 68pF Center pin: 0.4uH
Outer sleeve: 0.4uH
Between conductors: not measurable
DIY Silver
ICs Center pin: 0.301 ohm
Outer sleeve: 0.301 ohm
Between conductors: not measurable Center Pin: 12.39uF
Outer Sleeve: 12.39uF
Between Conductors: 18pF Center pin: 0.3uH
Outer sleeve: 0.3uH
Between conductors: not measurable
Let me start off by saying that the lengths of these cables are not equal. The Monster IC and my silver IC are approximately the same length: about 20-22 inches. The length of the standard freebie IC is about twice that: 40 inches. It may not seem fair to compare unequal lengths at first, but since I know of no one who would actually spend the time to cut a stock IC, it seems reasonable to compare the cables as they will actually be used. Resistance and inductance were measured with my LCR meter center pin to center pin and outer sleeve to outer sleeve on the same IC. The "between conductors" measurements for resistance and inductance were made by connecting the center pin to one probe of my meter and the outer sleeve of the same IC to the other probe. Capacitance measurements were made in the same fashion as the "between conductor" measurements for resistance and inductance.
Well, I suppose its not terribly surprising to find that the standard freebie cable that comes with the average CD player measures the worst of the bunch (even if we normalize the readings by diving these measurements by 2!). Particularly interesting is the between conductor resistance and inductance measurements. The only reasonable conclusion to draw from the resistance measurements is that the material used to insulate the conductors from one another in the freebie cable is not really an insulator at all... The Monster cable measures less resistance than my DIY Silver IC, but that is to be expected to some degree due to the heavier gauge conductors found in the Monster interconnect (single 36 inch run of 30 gauge silver wire meaures approx 0.300 ohms resistance, a dual run of the same length measures about 0.195 ohms). The inductance measurements show no difference between the Monster IC and my silver IC; however, the capacitance measurement is higher for the Monster than for the silver IC. Capacitance is related to high frequency roll-off (that is why capacitors are used in speaker crossover networks!), but this difference seems to be relatively small. Either way you look at it, we have achieved Chris' original goal of an IC with extremely low capacitance!"
OK What metal?
Overall best first getting worse in the ratings
Solid Silver 99.99% or better
lcofc copper
ofc copper
silver plated ofc copper
silver plated copper ( a lot of silver wires are on sale on fleabay but these are silver plated copper(not ofc), silverplated to prevent oxidation of the copper in adverse conditions eg military/aviation/space -- apparently this leads to the over brightness often attributed to silver
copper
I thought I would share my information with you
I am goung to stick with the same plan for chris's design with adaptation for the shorter interconnects but I am still undecided about the 5 metre one
Any comments?
Anyone want to sell me some silver wire ?
Cheers
Marvan
