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  3. 176588-170020

Well I joined the Silversmith FIDELIUM Speaker cable club today

The story behind this goes like this. I bought new speakers in December and their placement forced me to stop using my Wireworld Gold Eclipse III bi wire cables because they were too short. So for an interim cable I found a 2 meter pair of the "Regular" Eclipse III wires used being that I wanted to keep it in the "Family." My  entire loom for the most part is Wireworld Gold Eclipse III interconnects.  The Reg Eclipse III seemed fine but I alway felt I was missing something I was used to before, like it was just a little veiled comparatively. I've researched the hell out of cables and was just going to get a set of the New Eclipse 8's but when they raised the price for a 2M pair another $500 to $2000 I decided to look elsewhere, scouring used cables for months.  Well through that process I discovered the many threads and positive reviews on the Silversmiths, so since they were more like what  I was hopefully  willing to spend I ordered a 6 foot set. Today I placed them into my system and after about one minute into the track I was astonished! I couldn't move from my chair, I listened to the entire album in astonishment. They literally "fixed" my system, it's never ever sounded this good. It's only been a few hours so i won't go into everything that happened right now but new cables are not  supposed to sound this good straight out of the box. I am lucky. they blend with my system right away. The Bass was so immediately impactful I just cannot believe a cable can make this much change, the inner detail and transparency, wow! I know these things have been raked over the coals in these forums and their are some that are naysayers, but in my case I was one of the lucky ones because these babies are not going back to Chris!  I cannot stop listening, it's amazing.

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bugredmachine's avatar
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bugredmachine
409 posts
 

Nice! These are pretty darn good. Now if Jeff could get the IC's engineered.

tsushima1
1,165 posts
 

Good for you … Cue Ozzy and his curious agenda 😉

cd45123
191 posts
 

Jeff is a great guy. He’ll talk to anyone that’s willing about their setup and how to improve it.

I have had his cables now twice in my system and I still wonder what the resistance /inductance is of these although that is supposedly not relevant.

I would really like to get some other Silversmith owners to try EWA and Driade Flow and let me know what they think. Those two, to my ears, seem to let me hear deeper into the music, but I’d love to hear some other people’s take on this.

Ozzy has the Townshend Fractals, I believe. I have not heard Skogrand or Hemingway, but I hear these are also some of the best of the best.

I was always curious what $18k Greg Weaver replaced with Fidelium - maybe it was Stealth?

I’m glad though that these brought so much improvement with a minimal outlay. It’s definitely been one of the most disruptive products of the last couple years.

jjss49's avatar
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jjss49
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deludedaudiophile
493 posts
 

@cd45123 

I popped over to their website out of curiosity. I don't there there is any way to determine the inductance as it would be conditional on how close or how far you kept the two conductors from each other. There width would negate some of the variability, but there will still be variability.

There is some contradiction in the statement below. I don't believe they have a metal alloy 33 times better than copper or silver (one does not exist), however, the claim below it compares it to a thickness of 5.5 times less. I don't see any particular benefit to a 0.00018 equivalent thickness of copper of silver. That is sufficient for about 200MHz back of envelope. It does sound impressive though. Any metal alloy with a skin depth of 5.5x that of copper or silver will unfortunately be a higher resistance alloy comparatively.

Since they are unlikely to have the resources to create their own alloy, I have to assume they are using something off the shelf. Monel and Constantan alloys are both up in the 5.5x range almost exactly and are Nickel/Copper alloys. However, they are really awful conductors. A pair of speaker cables could have resistance as much as 1 ohm. That would explain a unique sound.

FYI - materials science guy, semiconductors and batteries so this stuff is old hat for me.

 

The skin-effect characteristics of our state-of-the-art FIDELIUM alloy are up to 33 times superior to those of copper or silver.  The FIDELIUM speaker cable, already at less than a thousandth of an inch thick, performs as if it were 5.5 times thinner, thus experiencing less frequency dependent attenuation and phase distortion than even a .00018 inch thick copper or silver ribbon or 64 gauge wire.  

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