Difference in sound between copper and silver digital cables?

Your system’s current sound and what you want more or less of determines the type of cable you should buy. Yes cables can be used like seasoning in the hands of a chef. You’re a sound chef. While design, solid vs. stranded, cotton vs Teflon and on and on all impact sound, silver does have a sound personality that always comes through. It is marked by sharp, crisp, and clear leading edges, slightly leaner overall presentation and the perception of increased speed and inner details. Place silver in cotton and silver becomes more open, natural and not quite as lean. However, it still exhibits the general silver sound in relation to pure copper.

Copper tends to deliver more mid-bass body and weight and is not as well defined in terms of leading edge detail. Bass is a tad more rounded and yes this can vary, but in general is accurate.

So you have sonic must haves and preferences. Your system does or does not meet these preference as well as you like so start cooking!

Caps and resistors, well most parts, also have a sound. One can dial in a system by seasoning with these parts and cables. This is my particular area of interest and one that I have many thousands of hours of experience in. Many Aphiles don’t believe this to be true or possible, but if one spends enough time, effort and due diligence on this area of study, then they would learn first hand just how real it is.

Take a simple tube dac with an output cap right before the RCA outputs. Try placing a Vcap Odam cap vs. say a Jensen copper foil cap in paper and oil and I can assure you this same dac will sound quite different depending on your choice. No ear straining is needed to hear the difference. My point is that materials matter and do indeed have a sound. Same is true for cabling.  

I tried an experiment a few years back...
- I built an extremely good digital cable with silver signal wires and exceptional RCA plugs
- I then "stepped back" the design by replacing the signal wire with copper - there was no change
- I then stepped back the design once more opting for a more affordable RCA plug - again there was no change.

The geometry of the cables is an advance Helix design, so that probably made a significant contribution to the performance of the cable.

The RCA’s finally used are silver coated copper, KLE Innovations Silver Harmony RCA and the copper wire was from Neotech.

With this design using a silver conductor seemed to offer no advantage.

With other geometries there may be some benefit to using silver conductors

Hope that helps - Steve

Try and learn. 

Yes you are right Doug! Always outlier experiences and who knows why? System? Ears? Break in? Bad pizza? 

@williewonka Steve: within the parameters of (the "experiment" / components / systems) you tested them, correct? Thanks.

With this design using a silver conductor seemed to offer no advantage.