Highly Polished wire????

Another thing I forgot to mention. Dan2112 mentions above the use of Jewelers Rouge for polishing the wire.

Looking at a table of dielectric constants I found the following: *Note - Teflon is usually considered the best dielectric next to air for audio applications.

AIR 1.0
AIR (DRY) 1.000536
ROUGE (JEWELERS) 1.5 - 1.6
TEFLON 2.0
TEFLON, PTFE 2.0
TEFLON (4F) 2.0
TEFLON, PCTFE 2.3-2.8

Perhaps the Jewelers Rouge (residue) is the hidden secret in making great sounding interconnects since its dielectric constant is even lower than teflon!! :)

Bwhite, goes to show that manufacturers don't need to be rocket scientists. First I heard that electrons don't move on the surface of a wire -- though I guess they could move on the "inside" surface ;-). What matters is that it works well. Would you mind sharing the manufacturer of the wire and whether a bulk purchase is required? Thanks.

Hi Ozfly - the wire is (I believe) manufactured by a Danish company called OdiO. Below is a link to a Chinese website (written in English) which distributes the wire.

THL Audio

You can at times find this wire available on Ebay (but the seller does not share information about the manufacturer).
Do a search for "Pure Silver Wire" (or click the link) and it will turn up a dutch auction for the wire sold by the foot or by 10 feet sections. The price is usually $1.60 per foot for 24 gauge wire which includes equal lengths of teflon tubing and "special" silver solder. 20 gauge wire is about $2.70 per foot.

ohmy.god@verizon.net

Since all wire is drawn by sucessive passes through very hard diamond dies, all wire has similar metalurgical properties from that process. To a great extent this is a sort of polishing - and in fact wire that has just been drawn is very bright and smooth.

After it sits about for a while it tends to oxidize. It can also oxidize as the result of heat required to melt the insulation (assuming insulated wire) which the wire is drawn into and through...

but for bare wire, yes, you could polish it with rouge or any one of a number of other common polishing compounds. Assuming they do not have any acidic or alkaline component left behind, the long term effect should be minimal due to polishing. Most "metal cleaners" have some sort of chemical component which if left behind will cause corrosion eventually.

Will polishing solid core silver wire make any sonic difference? Gee, it shouldn't, but who knows? It certainly shouldn't hurt - however you could make a very good case for polishing pure silver wire and then immediately putting it into a pure oxygen environment so that you get a uniform silver oxide coating, and no silver sulfates/ides (which one is it?) on the surface. This should yield the most stable wire - assuming that there would be a change if the wire became blackened... (the oxide being silver colored, I'm told).

At least it will look pretty. :- )

_-_-bear