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Silver Foil Speaker Cables anyone?

karlsushi

karlsushi

pfm Member
Another cable thread, because I know you all love them.

Having recently discovered the sonic joys of copper foil cables, I noticed that there are a couple of options for silver foil on the hifi collective website (Duelund and Mundorf).

Never tried silver cables of any description due to cost, but silver foil seems to be about the most 'reasonable' way of getting pure silver speaker cables. Plan would be to just put the foil into cotton tubing and solder some banana plugs.

Anyone have any experience of using silver foil cables, especially any thoughts on the sonic virtues versus copper foil?

Cheers
 
To get the ball rolling, I thought Isolda (copper foil) sounded pretty awful, was overpriced and badly made. I should imagine silver foil will be awful in a different way and more overpriced.
 
Alex S said:
To get the ball rolling, I thought Isolda (copper foil) sounded pretty awful, was overpriced and badly made. I should imagine silver foil will be awful in a different way and more overpriced.
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Wow, just had a look at Isolda cables. Is that the ones made by Townshend?

£700 for a 2m pair.

The mundorf copper foil kit I'm using from hifi collective was about £70 for the same length!
 
Yes the Townshend jobbies. Your version seems much more sensible. I’m not a capacitance/inductance expert but doesn’t foil behave rather oddly? Also, my Isolda was badly tarnished it’s entire length (whether that matters) and poorly terminated.
 
Alex S said:
Yes the Townshend jobbies. Your version seems much more sensible. I’m not a capacitance/inductance expert but doesn’t foil behave rather oddly? Also, my Isolda was badly tarnished it’s entire length (whether that matters) and poorly terminated.
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There is a suggestion that some amplifiers that don't like high capacitance and so could 'in theory' be an issue when using foils. But it is a a non-issue with my zero feedback valve amps and relatively short cable runs.

I also run the positive and negative cables in completely separate cotton tubes, so they're not especially close together.
 
Depends on the foil, I've a set of 5mm x .7mm speaker cables, in silk. They sound like cable, my 4mm copper sounds better in the bass at full tilt
 
Darren L said:
No, it's individual strands side by side it just looks like foil at a glance.
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The original Nordost Flatline was, IIRC, copper foil as colasblue suggested. Later iterations went to the ribbon-style topology with the micro monofilament/air dielectric.

I liked Isolda, but IIRC one big risk with it was that if you trod on the cable, you could short it out.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
The original Nordost Flatline was, IIRC, copper foil as colasblue suggested. Later iterations went to the ribbon-style topology with the micro monofilament/air dielectric.

I liked Isolda, but IIRC one big risk with it was that if you trod on the cable, you could short it out.
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Before my time, lol . I do remember another flat type cable, I think it was called 'Electrofluidics' or something like that, I can't remember now to be 100% sure but I think either Defintive Audio or Walrus Systems were big fans, maybe both.
 
Electrofluidics Monolith and Goertz cables were available about 20 years ago, there were copper and silver versions.
I also recall them being used with LV speakers
The late Allen Wright also wrote the SuperCable Cookbook which described how to DIY flat ribbon cables
 
You might want to investigate Silversmith Audio Fidelium cables, which are neither copper nor silver, but rather an alloy. I've been using them for a couple of years now, and they are the best speaker cables I've ever heard in my system. That said, I've always been a fan of solid core speaker cables, and the Silversmith cables have been a revelation.
 
palasr said:
You might want to investigate Silversmith Audio Fidelium cables, which are neither copper nor silver, but rather an alloy. I've been using them for a couple of years now, and they are the best speaker cables I've ever heard in my system. That said, I've always been a fan of solid core speaker cables, and the Silversmith cables have been a revelation.
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Yes, I did come across those in my foil research. They look great. But at around £1300 a pair of 1.8m cables, that's starting to take the cable thing beyond 'sensible' for me.

Would be interested to hear them though.
 
I have been playing with DIY foil cables with 3d printed connectors, for both interconnect and also speaker, and detailed interconnects here https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/adventures-with-copper-foil-cables.283553/

Although not silver (the prices as it needs 40m for my external x-over / biwired setp, are prohibitive), i did make several sets in copper, preferring 70mm over 44mm or (thinner) - not a huge difference, but i was only planning to do this once, so went for the largest available

https://flic.kr/p/2pEQVEL
 
the connectors are designed to fit OVER the plugs on the back of the speaker and amp. I did try making the cable itself the connector, but felt it was not reusable enough, so ended up rolling the cable around a 4mm mandrell and inserting / soldering a banana plug - looks a lttle messy on the outside, but the melted solder flows inside the copper tube and gives a really solid join

https://flic.kr/p/2pEQUCL
 
construction was:
  • cover each mono cable with kapton as insulator
  • lay them directly on top of each other (a la allen wright / vacuum state design)
  • separate them 25cm from each connector (you can see the 3D "cover" i made for this in in the 1st photo
in terms of sound, i am really very happy, and in terms of WAF i much prefer the white sleeving to boring black - but black and other colours are easily available

the main time for construction was covering with kapton - the only way i found to make it work was to make lots of 150mm strips, so i could wrap each one around both sides of the 70mm cable, and with 30mm wide tape this took around 40 strips/m, to give a little overlap, and took around 15mins for each mono metre - rolling the cable, adding sleeves and soldering the banana's took a further couple of hours, (for all 8 stereo cables)

cost was in the region of £400, including coloured filament for the 3d printing, sleeving, kapton tape, bananas and the mundorf 70mm copper

Silver/gold alloy in the same width would have made this close to £8000!

Overall, extremely happy and have no plans to tinker with speaker cables again anytime soon
 
sjs said:
Electrofluidics Monolith and Goertz cables were available about 20 years ago, there were copper and silver versions.
I also recall them being used with LV speakers
Click to expand...

Kev sold me those with the LV OBX I bought many years ago, think it was Hitachi SSX from amp to xover and then monoliths from xover to speaker.

Still have the Hitachi somewhere but the plastic wrap on the monoliths started separating and falling off so threw them away.
 
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