What might be the specific electrical parameters that give gold its often-stated, “warm” “smooth” characteristic? It’s surely not its resistance.
We could have cables of say, copper, silver and gold with gauge adjusted for identical impedance and yet they would surely sound quite different. (Not that I’ve seen pure golden cable, but hey, why not)
Do we have to go to the quantum level to explain the differences in transmission, or do materials just happen to have different frequency dependent resistity characteristics (well, impedance, again…)
Can we not measure this? If not, how come?
I’m no expert. From pure material differences I can confirm the well know sound characteristic behavior. I heard otherwise very similar solid core copper, silver and gold and the characteristic was the common sense you mentioned.
But if one has the chance to modify the molecular structure of conductors, material doesn’t play a big role anymore. That’s why it’s possible that the main effect of different materials is its molecular structure.
Aside of that, if a cable sounds analytical, bright, neutral or warm, imo is more depending on the design than the material at the end.
From a pure materials viewpoint assuming everything else is matched, how do the basic molecular bonds of copper, silver and gold really differ? Might the density quite simply have to do with perceivable differences?
Aren’t copper, silver and gold lattices cubic face centered?
my thought would be, that it’s no just cable, but also connectors plays role here.
then, as @jazznut mentioned , cable audio quality depends on the conductor structure (google OHNO cast, copper long-crystals) - when i moved from OFC to OCC (Ohno cast) i have immediately heard more natural sound (like less noise/grain)
another thing is the insulator - it has impact on the sound too (Teflon/PTFE seems good choice)
another thing is cable geometry (including number of cunductors, their gauge and if those are even isolated from each other etc)
and last but probably not the least, is the microphony of cable itself - it best cables use besides the insulator also wool to make sure as less noise as possible is transferred to cable by vibrations
When coming back to pure conductor, it seems to me, the more precise is metal produced (in regards to molecular lattice) - the cleaner sound you get. However i somehow feel that @Arenith you nailed it when mentioned that it’ actually frequency depended resistance (e.g. impedance) is also important here - and i’d think that it’s more important that all frequencies have the more-or-less same impedance , rather that having lowest impedance overall.
What could be a standardized way of testing conductor material specific impedance, in other words, leaving dielectrics and complex geometries out of the test? So not testing cable impedance, but pure material impedance?
Obviously we’d need each metal produced with the method that gives the most consistent and perfect lattice structure. Then test them in air (or nitrogen…) as bare conductor.
The shape? Maybe simply a cylindrical strip of wire, gauges adjusted for identical resistances.
Please add to this.
Has metal-specific impedance not been measured? If not, how come? It could finally give insight into the commonly observed tonalities of conductor materials.
I don’t see why this would even be hard to measure.
There’s a few (really, just a few) pure gold cables out there, one example being the Teresonic Clarison Gold.
It’s interesting that the developers, obviously fully aware that copper and silver should be better signal conductors, had to admit that they simply don’t know why their gold cable sounds subjectively the best. This lack of deeper understanding obviously poses a limit to further developments with the material.
There’s not such a huge plethora of material properties that could explain this curiosity. I doubt we need to delve deep into quantum mechanics… Somehow gold just stays elusive.
but does it really sound better?
and did they then compare with a similarly designed longer copper cable so as to equal the resistance of the gold cable?
just a thought
The Dagogo reviewer praised them.
Better is subjective but what is apparently objective is that pure gold cables exhibit some very unique properties in playback, which I guess could be summed up as “seductive”.
The reviewer did compare to the same manufacturer’s copper interconnects and found the golds to be much more of everything good that the coppers had offered.
