ray@utcsri.UUCP (Raymond Allen) (07/17/85)
A friend just handed me a flyer from a stereo store which contained the following ad. I'll submit the text without further comment. VECTEUR-> LINEAR CRYSTAL WIRE Copper is a good conductor of electricity. If we were able to look inside a piece of copper wire, we would see that it is made up of thousands of crystals. Electrical signals travelling along the wire must pass from crystal to crystal, during which process some energy is lost. Researchers have discovered that if wire is made of oxygen free copper (pure copper), which is heat-treated at high temperatures, the crystals will grow 20-30 times larger and those crystals can be aligned along the wire. Since the current flow now passes through fewer crystals, there will be far less loss of energy than in conventional wire. The product is called LINEAR CRYSTAL WIRE and it will deliver musical signals almost intact. We carry a product by VECTEUR ( imported from France ) at prices of $3.00 per foot for speaker wire and $77.00 for a pair of 1 meter interconnects with gold-plated RCA plugs. Ray Allen utcsri!ray
dsi@unccvax.UUCP (Dataspan Inc) (07/23/85)
Actually, this is * NOT * as stupid as it sounds. Walt Jung and those
guys who can discriminate among brands of coupling capacitors have been touting
the advantages of OFHC wire for years. If you'll get a good length of rubber
lamp cord (such as power tool cord) that has plenty of tarnish on the inside
conductors, and connect one end to a good, well damped amplifier; the other,
to a noninductive resistor; apply a square wave, and watch what happens! There
is a noticable degradation in high frequency performance.
OFHC wire in a noncorrosive encapsulant can be shown in the laboratory
to exhibit less of the RF skin effect. In addition, one can expect that the
presence of oxygen as a 'negative dopant' is not insubstantial at any frequency.Some of the stuff sold as 'speaker wire' should instead be marketed as
'semiconductor' material due to the wide variety of stuff used to plate the
copper or steel strands!
I've always found that Cerro 8 AWG type THN (gasoline and pet resistant)
hard drawn copper stranded will assure the destruction of your speakers should
an output transistor fail. MOST PEOPLE who buy this stuff are not replacing
monster wire but rather 24 or 26 gauge wire with a resistance of several
tenths to an ohm or more; no wonder they can hear the difference!
There are those (such as the Audio Amateur) who claim that one foot of
OHFC in the preamplifier (or 70,000 uFd of capacitor in the 6DJ8's heater
supply) can change a circuit from totally worthless to perfectly musical.
Perhaps this is indeed the case; but OHFC wire can be shown to be a far more
effective distortion reducing technic than the really wacko stuff.
As far as I know, the degree of polycrystallinality of copper is not
a factor. Then again, there are idiots who swear that AM stereo is fake,
too!
David Anthony
Chief Development Engineer
DataSpan, Inc