Do materials alter frequencies and speed?


Does anyone manufacture cables made from premium copper, silver and carbon? Would the combination be additive or muddy?
deckhous
Aball is right - there always is a time delay in all Inductive and/or Capacitive circuits with AC signals passing through them. This is because the electromagnetic/electrostatic fields induce a counter voltage back in the wire After the original signal has passed. A good example is when you pull the plug on a running vacuum cleaner, you get a spark at the socket because the magnetic field collapses when you pull the cord and it induces a high voltage in the wire. Also, this is basically how your computer monitor gets its high voltage to power the CRT.
The "counter voltage" is actually a traveling wave and doesn’t only go counter to the signal. When a signal passes through the cable, waves are induced by the electromagnetic image of the wire and are dependant on the reference ground - which is generally very nebulous in a mess of wires behind a stereo and winds up using system parasitic capacitances to sink the voltage (typically).

The problem is that the voltage and current proportionality MUST BE MAINTAINED in any system, from input to output. This is the key to understanding what I am talking about and some of you are probably already familiar with this since it is a direct repercussion of Ohm’s Law. When there is a discontinuity in the line - like a connection to an amp or speaker with differing impedances - the signal has to maintain this proportionality and to do this, it compensates for the differing interface resistances by creating traveling waves which are duplicate signals but travel at different speeds from the original one and go in both directions. This means you can have multiple signals, all phase shifted and arriving at different times at the speaker! All this is havoc on an audio system and is why low capacitance and inductance are desirable.

However, you still have impedance problems at the ends regardless of the cable properties. I believe that the majority of the problem lies in these impedance mismatches. I was very surprised to see the DarTZeel 108 amp and matching preamp use 50 Ohm cable connections between them to precisely eliminate this problem. Finally, a hifi equipment manufacturer trying to correct this obvious issue! It will be very interesting to see if other manufactures adopt this concept in the future. I think they will.

The vacuum cleaner spark is actually a somewhat different reason. The spark is not strictly due to traveling waves but because the vacuum cleaner motor is very inductive, you cannot interrupt the current instantaneously. When you pull the plug (without switching it off first), you see the uninterrupted current continue to flow until it goes through a zero crossing and extinguishes itself.

Anyhow, it is all very interesting and I plan on looking into these issues a lot more. It is turning into (yet another!) hobby for me. Arthur
Thank you, The various cable combos use silver & copper, silver & carbon and copper & carbon. If each conductor brings its own transmission signature would the broadest spectrum be derived from the use of all three? I am mainly thinking about speaker wires.
This obviously impacts dynamics.

It seems the 'speed' of the cable is usually stated between 60-90% the speed of light, depending on dielectric constant od the insulator used. How does this affect dynamics? I thought dynamic range is based on the noise floor...

steve