Could, for example, a fine-tuned, calibratedly biased condition for xenon plasma allow for a controlled enough discharge condition that we could quite precisely modulate signal through it?
Is it correct to think that adequately ionized noble gas poses negligible resistance for modulated discharghing through it? And would this be wrong to be called just arcing?
How steady-state could such discharge conditions be given proper xenon pressure and ionization bias? And of course proper isolation of the discharge conduit from microphonics.
No actually, why not scratch that, let’s just have a good old (but long and obviously extremely unpractically nonbendable and hard to maneuver) vacuum tube in place of any analogue cabling, with precisely calibrated transconductances in place to get a somewhat uncompromised flow of signal from end to end, and without wire other than the internal connections. Yes and with very low-loss impedance matching circuits in place, if when and how needed.
Would we probably end up with performance less than that of a wire? Possibly better?
So let me see if I understand. You are suggesting using the Xenon gas in place of wire for an interconnect or speaker cable? If so, I knew a “Neon Artist” who used bent glass and a variety of gases to make artworks of cool colours and designs so the shape could in fact be made to the shape necessary and I think long enough. One of his pieces surrounds a full size billiard table and is amazingly intricate. Now the question of whether the properties can be such that it’s an improvement.
Sadly I have food shopping to do so can’t think about it for a couple hours. Love your out of the box thinking my friend, quite thought provoking in an Einsteinian thought experiment sort of way.
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Usually in these type of gas enclosures you need very high voltage and you obviously get light emitted as the electrons go back and forth between energy states. Seems to me this would be quite noisy, and the various parameters of the conduction through the medium would be constantly changing also giving rise to lots of RF and EM noise. Usually the internal pressures are quite low but maybe with high pressures you’d get conduction without the spurious effects. Hmmm…
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Gas discharge, Xenon or otherwise, is an electron cascade process. It is utilized as best I know only in very specific applications. A key example being radiation detectors where the high energy particle (or photon, at x-ray energy and above) initiates ionization of a gas in a tube. And that leads to an electron cascade with amplification being the goal to produce a pulse that can be cleanly detected above a noisy background. So, it certainty has its’ uses (see mention of neon discharge tubes above), but I don’t see transmission of a low noise audio signal being one of those applications. Electron cascade is an inherently noisy process.