Carl, the "Z-plugs" that Nordost puts on their Solar Wind, Red DAwn, and SPM speaker cable (at least at my local dealer) is gold plated. Dekay- I use Audioquest SA-40 cable. I had been using a run of CV-4 on the bottom because I prefered it to the jumpers that B&W supplied with my N805s. For some reason, I never tried jumpers. So, today, I made up some CV-4 jumpers, to compare to the CV-4 on the low end. You know what? It seems that the differences are really, really small. And my jumpers aren't even broken in yet. So, instead of buying an additional 6 foot pair of SA-40, I'm just going to get 1 foot and make some jumpers out of that. However, the SA-40/CV-4 pairing is great. Same cable,(15 gauge, 4 conductor,)same design. THe SA-40 is FPS silver, the CV-4 is Perfect surface copper. The sound that I originally attributed going biwire was actually the sound of the B&W jumpers versus teh CV-4 jumpers I made today. You should check into making some good jumpers before slinging long green on an extra set of cables. Eldragon, Puubie is dead right. Silver oxide is a fantastic conductor, whereas copper oxide isn't. I think Cardas has silver plugs, but I didnt see them on the website, and I cant remember which site I saw them on. Audioquest makes some, but you have to use spades to bolt onto the Bananna plug adaptor.... not what I want. I'm shooting for an all silver system. I'm using Lapis3, and I have some Diamond3 on the way to try out. The sound is a tad laid back, but is really is detailed at the same time. It sounds very natural to me, not overly warm, not overly cool, Not too musical at the expense of detail, or too detailed at the expense of musicality-just happy. I'm getting there, too. SOMEBODY'S GOT MY SILVER PLUGS!!!!!!!!!!
