Sell a tazer labeled as a brain stimulator with diagrams showing where to place it, and how long to leave it on for.
My guess is that the US military knows more about passing signals of all kinds back and forth better than any one else around.
As Glen points out, "free" is not very specific, and a little oxygen is actually optimum for conductivity. So OFHC is an oxymoron.
John
On your piece of shit stereo gear... probably not.
On a $40k outfit, they are likely quite different.
Copper will harden when bent to quickly. This is why bending a wire, then bending it back the other way results in fractures in the wire and breakage.
Wire wrap wire is meant to be placed tightly around a square pin, and harden in place as the wrap tool wraps quickly. The square pin is meant to create an oxide free "gas tight" electrical connection somewhere along the length of the wrap. Regular Copper wire will not harden in place as well, and will sag back against the tension of the wrap, causing a connection failure, eventually.
I prefer using a helically coiled ribbon cable in parallel with mine... :-]
Not really. In the wire wrap days, it was beneficial as copper "work hardens" easily, and a good, fast wire wrap with good OFC meant that the wrap stayed where it was put, and remained a good integral connection longer.
Wire direction is mainstream. Expensive line cords are mainstream. Tube preamps are mainstream. Lots of idiots have credit cards.
John
Custom-formed gold-plated hardline coaxial interconnects are the next big thing. You heard it here first.
John
I'm quite fond of my 1950s-vintage Magnavox cabinets. Dual 12" midranges in each. Had concentrically mounted tweeters (4" paper/no suspension types) which I removed, opting instead for my own trapezoidally boxed creations. Typical listening level is fractional wattage, while dangerously loud music runs into the 10W range.
Now playing: Megadeth - High Speed Dirt Amp: stereo 10W SS amp. Quasi-complementary, using 2N3904's for the diffamp and 2N4401/03 for the rest. House-marked output transistors were switching motors or something undignified like that. Sounds great.
When winter comes around, I'll boot up Frankenhouse and Hept'AU7, for probably their fifth season, without a single change in tubes or bias needed. These amps are also around 10W, which is just barely into clipping for more than enough volume I need.
Tim
-- Deep Fryer: A very philos> > > >> As seen on slashdot :)
installed
You can buy very nice fine-strand mil-spec wire, #8 or 10 maybe, with very thin teflon insulation. Take a piece of that and slip it inside a nice silver-plated or tinned copper braid. Snug that down and cover with shrink tubing. The result is a coax with radically low inductance per meter, admittedly with a fair heap of capacitance.
I designed cable like that for NMR gradient drivers, to run between my amps and the grad coils inside superconductive magnets, often a 10 meter run or more. Regular paired conductors can have lots of inductance, maybe even enough to matter a little in audio. In NMR systems, where the load might be 1 ohm + 75 uH, it mattered a lot.
John
No. I am talking about thickly sheathed standard TFE SPC wire at high strand count. Where the user BRAIDS both sets of conductors together in a flat braid style to get noise resistant speaker cables.
Also, for your choice, there is SPC braid on many good mil coax choices, like rg179, etc. That when opened up, one could slip the wire(s) down it, and get SPC braid over SPC center and have a good, low resistance coax feed. albeit not 100% shielded as the rg179 would open up to fit over # 8 or 10 wire. There are larger coaxes out there with SPC braid too though.
BOING! :-]
Most consumers don't use hardline or can even recognize hard line when they see it. I guess selling semi-rigid coax for hi-fi might be a good start. Adding gold plating is suitable for the "professional" version. Might work if you polish the aluminum jacket.
However, methinks this might be optimizing whale bone corsets. Wires and cables are obsolete. Everything is going wireless. My crystal ball is back from the repair shop, so I can now see into the future. It shows a wireless utopia, where there are no cables between stereo components. Using 802.11a at 5.7GHz, the tuner, CD player, computah, internet radio, amplifier, and TV will all communicate with each without messy wires. You could easily build a distributed hi-fi with devices scattered all over the room. For example, putting the ampfifier near the speakers where it belongs. Since everything is digital, there's no loss of fidelity. Who needs wires anyway?
Too bad it's already patented (6684060):
Hmmm.... maybe I'll just gold plate the antennas.
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
I see visions of the mess made by the GUM (great unwashed masses) while trying to deal with a thermal wire stripper.
Silver plated for reduced skin effect? Great for RF frequencies, but kinda useless for audio, where the skin depth is about 8 mm at 100Hz. I don't think anyone can afford 8mm of silver plating thickness.
Personally, methinks something disgusting, like heavy guage ladder line might sell as speaker wire on the basis of superior common mode rejection.
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
Then just hire a few good reviewers. That's what everybody else does.
John
Things were rather different in "HiFi" back in the 50s. The main things were speakers were VERY efficient and also designed for limited power. Speaker cabs were HUGE which meant they were efficient in the bass ranges as well. I still have my old bass rig that I built which used a homemade 20 watt amp and Jensen coaxial speakers. Plenty loud for the bands of the day even early rock bands. My hifi had a 50 watt amp which was about all the power speakers of the day would take without turning to toast. And that sucker was LOUD! We took it to school (my buddy brought his too which gave us 100 watts total) to put on a rock show and that sucker ROCKED! We "invented" loud rock long before it was mainstream. Brought the school principal right out of his office. The key was efficient speakers and large efficient cabinets.
My bass rig today is almost a freakin' kilowatt and there have been times when it was just at the edge! BUT the cabs are small and portable. power makes up for size. Also note that ALL the power is going into bass reproduction. A couple of watts in the mids and highs can saw down a tree! But bass notes especially in a smallish cab just suck horrendous amounts of power.
And note that OFC wire is all about wire flexibility and all the rest is hype! Silver plating is often used for RF wire and connectors but does tarnish. I prefer gold plating because it doesn't corrode and makes the connectors more reliable under heavy use. But doesn't do anything for the sound. Well, on second thought, just maybe it does give the music more "sheen" and perhaps give the speakers a tad more "danceability". :)
When it comes to stereo equipment, I don't think "good" and "reviewer" belong in the same sentence.
Tom
Amplifiers directly in the speaker cabinet are nothing new, and are quite high end and high quality, in fact. And yes, that is the way things are heading.
Teflon wire strips with standard shear type strippers from ideal, or even Sears.
I don't need a primer on the subject.
It has nothing to do with skin effect. Silver conducts better. D'oh!
The ohms per foot is lower. Lower is better in this realm.
In the seventies, when I was a kid, my dad had a 50's era speaker at
15" that also had a coil in the magnet area to be fed a DC voltage to apparently make the standing magnetic field stronger. This sucker could easily handle 100W, but I don't think it was all that efficient. I think it was an old Juke Box speaker.ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.