Don, DC filament voltage is a standard on about all Mic and audiofool preamps. One of the reasons for "oxy free"cables is the very slightly lower resistance and better solderability. In an audiophile system where there might be 200 watts required to properly drive a woofer to reproduce 50cy at an impedance of 4 ohms the loss due to inadequate guage is quite noticeable.Silver coated OXfree wire has the lowest possible resistance/distance next to pure silver so the same guage wire will perform better. Your everyday speaker cables supplied with gear is mostly inadequate so there is room for the crafty merchandiser to hipe up anything that sounds better to the unschooled listener. Power cables suffer from the same problem,that being inadequate guage of wire to handle peak current draw without I/R drop. Once again expensive "miracle" wires of course improve on the accuracy of the amplifier when the original power cord was half the guage that is really needed.
As Hams we are inherently aware of soft AC effects with our classic transmitters and marginally regulated HT supplies. I remember in the 70's when the Jap invasion of cheap stereo gear started that the speaker cables were lucky to be 18ga and often less. As a reference I run over 1000W !!! into each of 8 18 woofers in a live reinforcement (Band) system via 12 ga cable and still do not have the necessary power to properly reproduce the lowest notes of the Bass guitar and keyboards. I don't mean an outrageously hi volume level either. Just simple physics. Almost all of the audiofool stuff is hype and marketing as well as smaller production runs of a product bringing about the higher prices. Some of the really outrageous $ figures are for handmade and built as ordered units that have a "cult" following. It's really nothing new to radio work ,cumulative capacitance on hi imp. cables,ground loops,imp.mismatch,etc. It's just that the audio world is fad driven and anyone can hipe up a sound technical app. to make it worth $$$ to the unaware. Very little consumer HiFi has ever come close to the accuracy of the recording sources so it doesn't take much of an "improvement" somewhere for it to be noticable. BTW I've worked in professional sound and recording as well as servicing the same for the last 30 yrs and still chuckle at what is promoted as the latest and best for the audio reproduction system. I have been using Mil Surp. silver teflon wire for years in my own projects and the Mil uses it almost exclusively in all equiptment since it's availability. I'm not trying to stand up for the audiophool community just had to point out that there is usually a good technical reason for most of it,sometimes really insignificant but hyped just the same. Enjoy! Bill KB3DKS --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html The reason this message is shown is because the post was in HTML or had an attachment. Attachments are not allowed. To learn how to post in Plain-Text go to: http://www.expita.com/nomime.html ---
