Let's talk about Silver...

I brought home some speaker cables that a friend wasn’t using to try them out. They are 8awg "mil spec" copper with a very nice looking silver coating on each strand. Nice gold plated BFA (aka Z style) banana plugs. Put them in and immediately noticed nice midrange and treble. Listening to jazz they seemed fine.

Then I put on some rock and some classical with good bass and they were severly lacking in bass (could be they are just strong in mid/treble so when I turn them down to get the midrange the right volume, the bass is too low. I plan to do a volume test with test tones without changing volume controls to see which it is.

If he doen’t want them back I’ll make a nice power cord from them.

Jerry

PS I keep repeating myself so I'm sure some of you have heard it before but I am a very strong believer in never using a cable for digital that isn't at least silver coated.

I've tried a bunch of copper, silver plated copper, and all silver cables.  Cables by DH Labs, Morrow, Harmonic Technology, Synergistic Research, XLO, Core Power Technologies, Apature (silver), Silver Audio, White Zombie, etc.

I generally favor the pure silver cables.  I landed on Black Cat Silverstar 88 silver cables for preamp to amp and dac to preamp. I also recently discover Graham Slee CuSat50 cables which are all copper.  Using it between my sacd player and preamp.  I like it so much that I ordered another pair from the UK to try between my phono preamp and preamp. 

I think it depends greatly on the design and quality of materials in the cable. I’ve found both Acoustic Zen and VooDoo (cryoed) silver interconnects to be nicely detailed and very musical and balanced.  Sometimes I think a lot of equipment is designed/voiced using copper cables so when customers use silver it might sound a little brighter than the designer intended, but that’s just a blind guess.  I’d be wary of cheap silver cables as that’s probably where you can run into trouble. 

My experience is that low cost silver interconnects tend to be harsh and bright. As you move up in quality that completely disappears. For instance I have had a set of real Nordost Odin 2 on my system and they were not even remotely bright or harsh... they were simply stunning. 

I spent several years (a couple hundred hours) back in the 90's comparing in detail a host of interconnects. My conclusion was that inexpensive interconnects sounded like their metal... copper, silver coated copper, or silver. But as you got into audiophile interconnects that distinction went away. Obviously a tremendous amount of design and testing goes into audiophile cables and they use the many different materials and designs to achieve their sound characteristics. 

Silver on AC plugs always sounded a tad thin and tipped up. Silver hook up wire in my builds always sounded a tad thin with less body than I care for and very detailed. Silver in my cable builds …. the same result. Always.

Expensive silver cables from other manufacturers can sound smooth, silky and nicely detailed. However, they still lacked the body, weight and meatiness of great copper. I suspect this is a subjective reality for me. Not something that is true always for all listeners. Welcome to the world of audio🙂.

As far as digital goes I find silver even more reflective of my above statements. This has been my experience in dacs and with USB cables. Again, I think this is absolutely subjective and a sensitivity I happen to have. This is not truth for all.