Could we expect a more than subtle audible difference if all the mains wire running to the house (and in the house) from the nearest transformer was suitable gauge OCC silver?
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Well…? How is it?
I seriously doubt that anyone’s ever tried that… Also pretty sure that nobody in the world makes a cable with silver conductors that would meet the specs for use as a secondary drop from a distribution transformer to the meter socket of a residence.
I’ve never seen anything advertised for in-house silver conductor cable either, but that’s potentially something that you could at least have someone make for you (at a ridiculous price point).
Something more realistic, if you want to clean up the incoming power to your whole house, would be to contact your electric utility and tell them you want to have your own distribution transformer serving just your house. Most will let you do that, but you’ll have to pay for everything (equipment, install, etc…), and you’ll then be responsible for maintaining it, so if something fails, you’ll have to cover the cost of getting it fixed. Being on a separate transformer would have a much bigger impact on distortion and voltage sag than reconductoring (unless your secondary drop is undersized), even if you could use silver.
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Yes, good points, I’ll have to see which is more expensive, haha.
Eventually I’ll have both made anyway. Electricity is, all in all, something I’ll eventually invest nearly all my capital in.
Idealistic concept:
Own oversized transformer, custom silver all the way, balanced mains with oversized isolation transformer, large enough for a house, silver contact recepatables, silver, silver all the way. Not to mention, OCC silver.
I frankly am not sure if I can ever have all this. Is this materialism…? Nah.
If anyone here can (for fun) approximate the costs for the mentioned installation and materials, with a reasonable error margin of let’s say 5000$
So:
-Privately owned main transformer right next to house
-From there on, all pure silver wiring of proper (a tad oversized) gauge, including the ground wire (terminated to a pure copper rod into moist ground with an automated ground waterer that keeps the earth around the grounding rod ideally mineralized. Why not if we go this far… Jason Victor Serinus of SP actually worded the idea of periodically watering the grounding rod. He refrained just to keep a sane social status in his neighbourhood. Hhhhhh)
-For the fully balanced mains, an isolation transformer large enough to have 10x headroom for powering let’s say all modern mandatory appliances, lighting around fifty 50W lightbulbs (disregard the LEDs), water pump, floor heating at 24°C for let’s say 100m^2, oh, and the audio rig! Let’s say it’s a modestly power hungry system with all the bells and whistles that are mandatory such as power plants. Every device is on 100% of the time and the system is playing music at reasonably loud levels at least 50% of the time. Uhh, what else needs power?
As for how much 9AWG silver wire the house needs, let’s say… Frankly I don’t know, but let’s say it’s a 10m × 15m house with 10 rooms/spaces of various sizes, the listening room takes up 50m^2. Account for wire running along the perimeter and another wall per room and along the roofs, in pairs. So and so…
Total of 30 hospital grade rhodium sockets.
I know this is all very very vague, I’m just trying to get a grasp on how impossibly expensive something like this would be. Would you wager that someone actually has something like this? I mean, why not, all of this is relatively easily accomplished with some money. Meaning, a lot. Right?
Hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars is my best guess!
Well, thought so. But hey, some speakers cost hundreds of thousands, so surely someone out there has invested in having their mains topped out.
Maybe some heavily mains-piquant guy in Japan, at the very least?
Then again, could someone knowledgeable please clarify the approximate benefit that could be gained from all this superlative use of silver?
Obviously I’m presenting very idealistic concepts, but I wouldn’t consider them overly superlative in the sense that it’s all possible to do, be it hundreds of thousands or whatever.
I’d like to know a bit of mains cable protection, how important is the minimization of leakage? It got to my mind when I read the description of Mike Lavigne’s mains installation in his barn. Read about it, he’s quite the extremist about mains quality.
Obviously balanced mains does somewhat guarantee the benefit of the wiring as a whole not acting as a big antenna, so to say. The effect on audible aspects of such a reduction in local pollution is questionable but interesting.
It would be a good deal cheaper, and the sound would be much better, if one simply hired the musicians to play for you live.
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@rower30
If your expertise does include mains wiring and transformers, would appreciate your comment on the matter.
Does a transformer with silver-plated copper windings have much added benefit over plain copper?
If the wiring is silver, doesn’t a copper-wound transformer act as a bottleneck?
I tend to think that a mains transformer has enough winding length for solid silver to not be price-efficient as much as the wiring from it, and not sure about even the latter as I am a novice trying to learn a bit by asking question after question.
OK, think about it a second. The magnetic field in the transformer is related to the current in the windings. Current is I= E/R to as we lower resistance at a given windings ratio (voltage you want) the current goes up for a given load. A fixed size of wire in silver has lower resistance than copper, so a smaller more size efficient transformer could be made if you need more current.
No we have a smaller transformer. Is the space in the box so minimal we need to spend so much to get so little advantage. Silver isn’t exponentially lower DCR than copper: 63x10-6 silver verses 59x10-6 siemen copper. The current advantage isn’t huge, but it is “there”.
Once we get the transformer smaller what other advantages do we MEASURE at 60 Hz? Not much, really. The skin depth at 60 Hz is fully diffusion coupled through the wire so improvements based on that aspect of things or Vp linearity improvements at a constant 60 Hz are moot, we have but one frequency to worry about!
The signal off the transformer is fully rectified to DC, so any trace of its origin has to be destroyed…or we have a really poor power supply. We don’t want to even tell it was ever AC coupled through a transformer in the end product, DC. All we have left is current Volt Amp, VA, delivery capability at a specific heat tolerance at that current draw.
Best,
Galen Gareis
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So, a transformer and the wire are actually not beneficial in silver as much as we’d hope for the its cost.
I get that the ratios are not mathematically that far apart, but our ears are so unlinear that I wonder why people prefer the nature of silver wire at lengths of, say, speaker wire and even in mains receptables.
Could it be that the nature of silver wire leads to much psychosomatic effects rather than benefit measured in terms of ratios versus ear specifity?
I don’t have a clue on how much the ears transcend ratios of wire. Maybe we’re far from understanding this?
Not ALL people…
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It depends on where the silver wire is. On the power supply side it a DC “signal”, and that’s used to set the gain of the amplifier circuits. Proper DC has no sound in and of itself. Wire material, used right, won’t modulate the DC ripple to create any more, or less, DC ripple than any other wire in the transformer when it is set-up right.
The advantage of power cords, is to use an AWG size that mitigates any difference in the neutral and ground paths such that you don’t get ground loops. This is mostly what people refer to as the “blackness” or lack of hum in the S/N signal.
If you look at the test data on electronic componenets, you can see the power supply spuria in the traces (half rectified noise). This isn’t really associated with the wire in the transformer as much as how well the magnetic field interference AROUND the transformer is managed. This gets superimposed onto the measured S/N of a device.
On the AC side, our signal leads, silver is different than copper in it’s properties and grain effects. How well you adjust to these differences, or don’t adjust in many cases, determines the cable’s calculated and measured linearity. How much does it need to change to be heard? Silver’s resistivity is sited all too often as the “reason” it is different than copper but that spec is passive. The skin depth and Vp linearity are more likely candidates for differences in the sound of metals as are the grain structure. The resistivity is measured with the grains, more grains increses resistivity but…this should not be heard like DC can’t be heard. The EM signal is somehow changed with respect to time for us to hear a difference.
How? No one really can show how. The current density path inside a wire farther from the surface creates magnetic waves that are superimposed onto the outer ones, that are closer to the ground reference. What we hear is a addition of all the EM energy in the wire with respect to time. This distance is “time” as the signal has to travel farther to find the ground reference. How the grains change that Dv/Dt function is really hard to fathom as it is FAST and not all THAT far! But the well known skin depth properties are real, and thus the time differences inside to outside the wire and the ground reference are real. It does change the EM voltage amplitude in time with differing wire sizes.
Does using a smaller silver wire for the same DCR as a copper wire change the EM signal based on the
faster" EM field superposition? This is indeed a “fact” but is it HEARD?Add to that the grain structure and what that seems to be doing as the same AWG wire, but with differing draw science are different. So BOTH properties are doing something.
Remember, if a property doesn’t change the EM voltage signal over time, we can’t hear it as this is what we are moving from A to B with a cable. The final EM signal voltage level captured in time is the whole enchilada.
What we know as PHASE is simply time based shifts in voltage signals before they are added, and this time shift provides a different resultant voltage magnitude.
Best,
Galen
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Why not go off grid for the hifi? Solar charging a large battery (Tesla power wall type thing) completely isolated from all other appliances in the house. Would be a lot cheaper.
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Well, so and I guess?
Including and DC batteries for a phono stage?