Highly Polished wire????

OK say we do polish with a rouge, wouldn't by the act of polishing embed even more particles of the rouge into the metal. High purity copper and Silver are not the hardest metals on earth. Seems that the only way to polish would be to chemically treat them. Once you remove the Copper Oxide or Silver Oxide it immediately starts to form again. I am not doubting there is stuff on the surface of the wire that should be removed from the manufacturing process,like grease and stuff, but just wondering if the process of "polishing" by physical contact adds more than it removes. Would be interesting to hear how companies like Nordost "polishes" their wire. Anybody have any clue about this process?

Trelja,

I am very impressed with that post. So if you were to get some fine silver wire, would you polish it? With what and then how would you clean it after polishing. You wouldn't happen to have a SEM handy would you .. :-)

- Dan

Trelja,

Thanks again for the informative post. I went and looked at Audio Notes web site and I noticed they sell 99.99% wire. Yet there are those here and on other sites that insist that a higher purity wire is the best like 99.999 or 99.9999. What is your opinion about this?

- Dan

Hmmm Interesting... Also from Silver Audio's website..

"Silver Audio is therefore thrilled to offer the solder-less, TopLine WBT locking RCA connector as an option for the 4.0s and 6.0s. WBT is universally regarded as the Rolls Royce of Audio connectors and their model 0108 represents the top of their line. This cost-no-object connector features the most powerful locking mechanism in the business and is precision machined in West Germany to exacting tolerances of <2/100 mm! The base metal is an extremely conductive, proprietary alloy based on over 99.996% pure copper....."

Maybe copper can be more than 99.99% pure.