Are silver coated cables a bunch of hype?

May I second the cogent responses of twl and also say that the pro silway is a fine example of silver copper done right.The qed silver anniversary is very inexpensive,about 3.00 dollars a foot and represents to me a way of testing the sonic signature of speaker wire without getting hosed(pun intended).Thats the great thing about this game...look long enough and be patient enough and you can come seriously close to mega buck systems on relatively speaking a song and a dance.

Bear's cables are suspended in a way too. They are three thin wires taht are braided inside a fat tube of air.

Twl, as for tone control, his cables are meant to be as neutral as possible. That, along with a low inductance and relatively low capacitance, were his design goals.

Maybe this is another example of specs on a sheet of paper vs. real world implementation. As Albert said, design is everything.

Yes, guys, and as I mentioned above, the skin-effect problems are not present, either at all, or to a much less degree, in a properly designed cable. When the diameter of each conductor is less than twice the figure of the skin-effect depth in that material, the entire conductor becomes "skin-effect", and the frequency anomalies do not occurr. However, when high amplifier power is needed, a single small conductor may not be sufficient. That is why multiple small conductors are wrapped together in a bundle. They must be individually insulated from each other, or there will be "strand-jump" and the entire bundle will behave as a single conductor(worse actually), and the skin effects will again take place. This bundling of wires has it's own problems associated with it too, which is why, in my low power system, I use small guage, single conductor wiring for everything. All DIY. Whenever possible, simpler is usually better, as long as it is done right. I'm sure that the wires you all mention above are well-designed cables and provide excellent sonic quality for your systems.

I could be wrong, but I thought I read some years back that one of the key reasons for coating copper with silver was to eliminate problems of copper being corroded by certain formulations of Teflon. I know that Teflon/Copper cables exist, so perhaps it is either a small issue or different formulations of Teflon present more or less of a problem.

Redkiwi, good to see you again. Hope you intend to stick around.