Hook-up Wires

[martin manning]

I would try some if these exotic wires, but I’m afraid I might run it in the wrong direction and spoil the whole effect! ;^)

[Bombacaototal]

Very insightful and thanks for sharing. I am building an amp with your least favourite, a PTFE mil-spec, 1.5mm thick, silver-plated copper core conductor with 19 strands, 1000V, 14A. I choose it because I thought it might be more HI-FI ish (a tad brigther) given I am expecting this specific amp to be a bit on the dark side. Hopefully it won't be overly bright, brittle or sterile. I will report back once it is done.

What brand/part number are you using on the high quality stranded copper wire with polyethylene insulation? I'd love to try these on the next amp

That's some stout wire! It's like 15awg, it is definitely not going to add any soft/warm/fuzzy. I think if you were worried about the amp being dark you went the right way though the gauge seems a little large but is not coming from experience just a gut feeling. There is so much that goes into the sound of the amp and wire, because the lengths and amount are small/short (except for what's in the trannies), it's effect on the sound will be more subtle in comparison to other components like transformers or even capacitors. But all those subtleties add up and helps make the difference. Again my experience is extensively in hifi but I don't doubt some of the lessons I have learned have some validity with guitar amps. I think if the rest of the amp was being built with metal film resistors, and teflon film capacitors then you might have issues with the tone sounding sterile but people usually don't put those in guitar amps;)

The PE wire that I have was made for Vampire wire many years ago by Neotech/Wan Lung. It is a 20awg (iirc) UPOCC copper that is 99.9999blah,blah,blah pure (ha) and was a little soft for interconnects but I am hoping will sound very nice in the Matchless 2 channel 15w I am building (1ch Spitfire 2ch Nighthawk). Unfortunately the wire has not been available for a long time to end users.

As far as the thickness the PTFE wire I got is as thin and manageable as a standard 3A-rated PVC wire.

[pdf64]

Audible difference? I doubt it.

But I prefer stranded PTFE. Doesn't melt. Comes in cooler, brighter, more vidid colors. And the jacket is thinner compared to PVC of the same wire gauge, so it takes up less space and it's easier to route. Although stranded does not hold its shape as well as solid.

Other than that, whatever. It's wire. And we're talking about guitar amps here, not lab equipment.

My hypothesis is that thinner insulation facilitates a lead dress that puts the conductors in closer proximity. Over longer parallel runs, that may lead to greater capacitive coupling between them, which may, under particular settings / conditions, cause a measurable difference in performance between otherwise identical circuits built with thin and thick insulation on their wiring.
I like wire with thick insulation, sold as 600V 105C 22AWG 0.5mm2 tri-rated in the UK, TEW E51597 AVM Style 1015 BS6231; it keeps the conductors that tiny bit further apart, the insulation seems heat resistant and doesn't creep back from the joint when being soldered and copes well with accidental contact with the iron due to my general carelessness.

[cpk313]

Sigh. - yes, sigh

Humans have an almost infinite capacity for self deception

They certainly do.

If it cannot be measured, does it even exist?

Ah, there's the rub isn't it? Can you measure the mass of sub-atomic particles? I can't, but that doesn't mean I stick my fingers in my ears and drone, "untrue,untrue,untrue,untrue" when someone brings up quarks. That's a bit silly. I have had conversations with people who can measure a whole host of conductor related audio phenomena. The aforementioned wire directionality being one of them. Micro-abrasions on the surface of the wire left by the drawing dies has an audible effect on high frequencies. This phenomena which is typically derided as BS is now measurable, I refer you to electrical engineer Garth Powell. Previously head engineer at Furman, now an engineer/designer at Audioquest. He can measure it, I have talked with him about it. I don't know the SOP of the testing but I don't know that for determining the mass of sub-atomic particles either.

Can you define what you mean by: Sure
Brighter Increase in higher frequencies, 3-10k, most people don't hear much over 10k, I'm at 14-15K on a very good day.
Sterile-lacking warmth, not necessarily harsh but not pleasant unless of course you're going for that
"bad in highend audio for anything carrying signal"- opposite of good
"solid silver has the most potential" - highest fidelity in playback
"balanced presentation" even frequency response
"detail retrieval"- amount of recorded information retrieved in playback

I'm completely with you on "it didn't hurt". It's the extra zip/focus/sterility/balanced presentation/detail retrieval/softness/peakiness and so on that I'm having problems with. How do I define those, let alone measure them?

They are all subjective descriptions because most people understand that more readily then there is a 7db peak at 3.2k Hz. Just because you are uncomfortable with those terms because they are not somehow universally standardized with correlating frequencies and spl's doesn't discount there effectiveness in convoying sonic information in an informal setting which this is.

If you open up even a very expensive amp very few have "special' wire in them, some do use silver but typical it is nothing to write home about so how much the wire you use in a guitar amp effects it's sound is probably very small as I wrote prior; subtle (at best). But to say it has no effect would not be accurate either. Is that sublteness important? That's up to the end user isn't it.

I will the first to admit that the audio field, especially highend playback, is filled with people who are full of shit and are about making a buck rather then achieving the highest level of reproduction, which is ultimately subjective, because really whatever you like best is what is best for you, regardless of other's perceptions/beliefs and there inability to accept other's values. A lot of people need someone to tell them what is good rather then trusting themselves and make decisions based on marketing rather then performance. That is a big reason I have walked away from that field and decided to focus more on making music.

how do I measure the various effects so I can reach some predefined goal, rather than just swapping out stuff and hoping for a good result?

It's a bit like cooking, right? Give 10 people the same recipe and you will almost certainly have 10 dishes that taste different. Maybe those difference's are subtle (maybe not) but those differences are what separates good from great.

[R.G.]

Sigh. - yes, sigh

Yes. Sigh.

Humans have an almost infinite capacity for self deception
They certainly do.

Good. We have common ground for discussion.

If it cannot be measured, does it even exist?
Ah, there's the rub isn't it? Can you measure the mass of sub-atomic particles? I can't,

I have actually watched it being done. Yes, it's measurable.

but that doesn't mean I stick my fingers in my ears and drone, "untrue,untrue,untrue,untrue" when someone brings up quarks. That's a bit silly. I have had conversations with people who can measure a whole host of conductor related audio phenomena. The aforementioned wire directionality being one of them. Micro-abrasions on the surface of the wire left by the drawing dies has an audible effect on high frequencies. This phenomena which is typically derided as BS is now measurable, I refer you to electrical engineer Garth Powell. Previously head engineer at Furman, now an engineer/designer at Audioquest. He can measure it, I have talked with him about it. I don't know the SOP of the testing but I don't know that for determining the mass of sub-atomic particles either.

Good. You don't want to be accused of trying to keep quarks out of people's ears.

I'm glad that there is some attention being paid to try to measure the supposed phenomena. I'd love to hear of multiple, peer reviewed analyses all showing that the proposed various phenomena may be measurable. My mind is always open to newer, finer measurements of phenomena. So: please point me to (1) rigorous (2) independently verifiable (3) repeatable measurements of the phenomena. It is always good to be open to advancing techniques of measurement.

Can you define what you mean by: Sure
Brighter Increase in higher frequencies, 3-10k, most people don't hear much over 10k, I'm at 14-15K on a very good day.

So far so good. Tinklier, then. How much increase is noticeable, on average, as brighter. If I decrease things under 1K, does that sound brighter, too?

Sterile-lacking warmth, not necessarily harsh but not pleasant unless of course you're going for that

This warmth you speak of - what exactly is that?

"bad in highend audio for anything carrying signal"- opposite of good

it's true that English as a system tends to push to polar opposites of concepts, so bad and good can qualify, but I was more interested in the "in highend audio". What is the sound of a "bad" in "highend audio". Is it independently verifiable? Is it just "whatever pleases you at the moment"?

Is it measurable? Can something be 093 bad?

Is it repeatable? If I get a representative random sample of people, play the same music to them through the same system, excepting I change out one "good" wire for one "bad" wire, would they, be able to choose good from bad at a rate that is statistically more significant that random guessing from the same experiment where I change NO wires? Well, OK, one wire is a strict test in a total system. How about two wires? Three? Half of them? At what number/length of good wires versus bad wires will people be able to even tell them apart as different, let alone good or bad? What if half the people just don't like the music being played? Can they tell a difference in pure tones? How about band limited noise? What's good for sines ought to be good for noise, right?

"solid silver has the most potential" - highest fidelity in playback

So, if silver has the highest fidelity in playback, presumably something else is better (it's that old English tendency to force opposites again) and since copper is the most common conductor, presumably you're telling me that silver has higher fidelity in playback than copper.

I'm going to assume that by "fidelity" you mean "freedom from distortion".

So let's get out the meters again. What is the average distortion of a copper wire?
Given that number, what is the distortion of a same-size, same-insulation, same physical arrangement silver wire? How about a same-conductivity wire, which is smaller due to silver's higher conductivity?
In fact - inquiring minds want to know - can we rank metals by their distortion?
Does the distortion of a metal wire vary with its physical size - eddy currents, you know - or by it bulk conductivity, mechanical hardness, stranding, alloy, or anything else?
Would a superconductor have even less distortion?

"balanced presentation" even frequency response

I like that definition very much. I think. If "balanced presentation" means exactly the same as "even frequency response" and "even" means "ruler-flat", then there is a simple translation between the jargon of "balanced presentation" and "flat frequency response". One does wonder why if "balanced presentation" really means "flat frequency response" it isn't said that way.

"detail retrieval"- amount of recorded information retrieved in playback

(1) what kind of information, (2) how do you measure that amount of information? (3) CAN it be measured? (4) if it can't be measured, does it exist or not? Lest you think this is rhetorical, subtle things like quantum superposition were theorized to exist long before they were proven, and we're far from figuring out how to measure and use thse subtleties. I'd really like to know what is being picked up. For instance: can your choice of wires eliminate certain information from playback? Presumably that would come as some form of either loss of frequency response at some (?all?) frequencies, or as a distortion which eliminates some information and substitutes in distortion to replace or mask it. Given that we're trying to measure the distortion of a silver wire as differentiated from the distortion of a copper wire, and the signal passes through amplifying devices, whether transistor or valve, with both measurable (and presumably much higher) distortion, and then through speakers with gross distortion compared to the active devices (and presumably resistors and capacitors with their own distortion to account for) how would we ever tell what information we were supposed to get in the first place?

Another thought just struck me. Playback of ANYTHING involves sensing either the position, magnetic orientation, or reflectivity of some playback medium. Actually, there used to be electrical field recording devices, but they've gone by the wayside. It can't get any finer than sensing the positions of individual atoms, can it? We can, with some difficulty, sense the positions of individual atoms with scanning electron force microscopes. Actually, to be correct, we're sensing the exclusion regions of the electron orbitals, as best I remember it, but at this level, the atomic surface looks like a 3d arrangement of marbles of various sizes. Presumably the relative positions of the "marbles" is as much as we're likely to get out from any conceivable present day playback device. To sense this, a playback device has to be atomically sharp in its sensing. Even if we had that, the passage of individual atoms past an atomic scale sensor has to generate a lot of noise that is unlikely to be of audio interest. So even if we had perfect wires, and atom-scale sensors for playback, much of what we'd get would be noise, and a fair amount of that would be at frequencies we can't hear (even on a good 15kHz day) so for pleasant playback, traded off against unvarnished fidel... er - high accuracy we'd be after some kind of filtering to remove all the non-audio junk. Ooops. That's another can of worms, I guess.

I'm completely with you on "it didn't hurt". It's the extra zip/focus/sterility/balanced presentation/detail retrieval/softness/peakiness and so on that I'm having problems with. How do I define those, let alone measure them?
They are all subjective descriptions because most people understand that more readily then there is a 7db peak at 3.2k Hz. Just because you are uncomfortable with those terms because they are not somehow universally standardized with correlating frequencies and spl's doesn't discount there effectiveness in convoying sonic information in an informal setting which this is.

OK. I'm with you. We're being soft, cozy, loose with definitions, just having a few beers, no real, solid definitions involved.

How do I, as an amp maker/fixer/modder make anything useful out of that? Is "silver wire is better" the same as saying "redheads are better"? This forum is at least notionally technical, and as such ought to have some substance underlying a straight statement that something is better than something else. Unless there is that as a basis, it's just as good to say that wire with green insulation sounds better than wire with black-colored insulation, but that you need to keep your wire choices to a balanced insulation color spectrum. Where's the reality to be found?

If you open up even a very expensive amp very few have "special' wire in them, some do use silver but typical it is nothing to write home about so how much the wire you use in a guitar amp effects it's sound is probably very small as I wrote prior; subtle (at best). But to say it has no effect would not be accurate either. Is that sublteness important? That's up to the end user isn't it.

I think the way I'd put it is that lacking a measurable foundation, people do a lot of stuff just because they seem to enjoy whatever it is. They will then go off and try to justify what they do. So if something makes you happy, that's great! Go do it. But some people like [!] to know the numbers.

I will the first to admit that the audio field, especially highend playback, is filled with people who are full of shit and are about making a buck rather then achieving the highest level of reproduction, which is ultimately subjective, because really whatever you like best is what is best for you, regardless of other's perceptions/beliefs and there inability to accept other's values. A lot of people need someone to tell them what is good rather then trusting themselves and make decisions based on marketing rather then performance. That is a big reason I have walked away from that field and decided to focus more on making music.

Good. I like that very much. Please, please, please do not import the hifi tweako mindset into guitar amps. Leave it where it disgusted you, and don't import the ... um... nonsensibilities.

It's bad enough already, with famous guitarists demanding that their amp techs reverse individual resistors in circuit to see which way they sound best. The business of speakers having distortion is very much not rhetorical. It's measurable, and easily. A change of speakers changes things so much that the entire amp sounds different. Silver wire won't help.

how do I measure the various effects so I can reach some predefined goal, rather than just swapping out stuff and hoping for a good result?
It's a bit like cooking, right? Give 10 people the same recipe and you will almost certainly have 10 dishes that taste different. Maybe those difference's are subtle (maybe not) but those differences are what separates good from great.

OK. But don't go on a cooking show and tell people that ground up snail shells from the plains in Nepal will make the result magical.

And great chefs are notorious for not giving away their secrets, to the point that if they tell you the "secret" you can be sure that it's not really the secret.

[xtian]

Presumably the relative positions of the "marbles" is as much as we're likely to get out from any conceivable present day playback device.

I am DEFINITELY patenting the "marbles." Thanks for the tip. Don't tell anyone else until I get my reg in the mail.

[Charlie Wilson]

Hmm, maybe this section should be called the condescending technical discussion.
CW

[martin manning]

My hypothesis is that thinner insulation facilitates a lead dress that puts the conductors in closer proximity. Over longer parallel runs, that may lead to greater capacitive coupling between them, which may, under particular settings / conditions, cause a measurable difference in performance between otherwise identical circuits built with thin and thick insulation on their wiring.

Capacitance wire-to-wire and between a wire and the chassis is real and measurable. Geometry and the dielectric constant of the insulation are involved. PTFE has a higher dielectric constant than PVC, but the insulation is typically thinner by approximately the same factor, tending to cancel the difference if the spacing is determined by the insulation. In any case these are small capacitances, on the order of a few pF, generally assumed insignificant in the audio frequency range.

[cpk313]

Sigh. - yes, sigh

Yes. Sigh.

Humans have an almost infinite capacity for self deception
They certainly do.

Good. We have common ground for discussion.

If it cannot be measured, does it even exist?
Ah, there's the rub isn't it? Can you measure the mass of sub-atomic particles? I can't,

I have actually watched it being done. Yes, it's measurable.

but that doesn't mean I stick my fingers in my ears and drone, "untrue,untrue,untrue,untrue" when someone brings up quarks. That's a bit silly. I have had conversations with people who can measure a whole host of conductor related audio phenomena. The aforementioned wire directionality being one of them. Micro-abrasions on the surface of the wire left by the drawing dies has an audible effect on high frequencies. This phenomena which is typically derided as BS is now measurable, I refer you to electrical engineer Garth Powell. Previously head engineer at Furman, now an engineer/designer at Audioquest. He can measure it, I have talked with him about it. I don't know the SOP of the testing but I don't know that for determining the mass of sub-atomic particles either.

Good. You don't want to be accused of trying to keep quarks out of people's ears.

I'm glad that there is some attention being paid to try to measure the supposed phenomena. I'd love to hear of multiple, peer reviewed analyses all showing that the proposed various phenomena may be measurable. My mind is always open to newer, finer measurements of phenomena. So: please point me to (1) rigorous (2) independently verifiable (3) repeatable measurements of the phenomena. It is always good to be open to advancing techniques of measurement.

Can you define what you mean by: Sure
Brighter Increase in higher frequencies, 3-10k, most people don't hear much over 10k, I'm at 14-15K on a very good day.

So far so good. Tinklier, then. How much increase is noticeable, on average, as brighter. If I decrease things under 1K, does that sound brighter, too?

Sterile-lacking warmth, not necessarily harsh but not pleasant unless of course you're going for that

This warmth you speak of - what exactly is that?

"bad in highend audio for anything carrying signal"- opposite of good

it's true that English as a system tends to push to polar opposites of concepts, so bad and good can qualify, but I was more interested in the "in highend audio". What is the sound of a "bad" in "highend audio". Is it independently verifiable? Is it just "whatever pleases you at the moment"?

Is it measurable? Can something be 093 bad?

Is it repeatable? If I get a representative random sample of people, play the same music to them through the same system, excepting I change out one "good" wire for one "bad" wire, would they, be able to choose good from bad at a rate that is statistically more significant that random guessing from the same experiment where I change NO wires? Well, OK, one wire is a strict test in a total system. How about two wires? Three? Half of them? At what number/length of good wires versus bad wires will people be able to even tell them apart as different, let alone good or bad? What if half the people just don't like the music being played? Can they tell a difference in pure tones? How about band limited noise? What's good for sines ought to be good for noise, right?

"solid silver has the most potential" - highest fidelity in playback

So, if silver has the highest fidelity in playback, presumably something else is better (it's that old English tendency to force opposites again) and since copper is the most common conductor, presumably you're telling me that silver has higher fidelity in playback than copper.

I'm going to assume that by "fidelity" you mean "freedom from distortion".

So let's get out the meters again. What is the average distortion of a copper wire?
Given that number, what is the distortion of a same-size, same-insulation, same physical arrangement silver wire? How about a same-conductivity wire, which is smaller due to silver's higher conductivity?
In fact - inquiring minds want to know - can we rank metals by their distortion?
Does the distortion of a metal wire vary with its physical size - eddy currents, you know - or by it bulk conductivity, mechanical hardness, stranding, alloy, or anything else?
Would a superconductor have even less distortion?

"balanced presentation" even frequency response

I like that definition very much. I think. If "balanced presentation" means exactly the same as "even frequency response" and "even" means "ruler-flat", then there is a simple translation between the jargon of "balanced presentation" and "flat frequency response". One does wonder why if "balanced presentation" really means "flat frequency response" it isn't said that way.

"detail retrieval"- amount of recorded information retrieved in playback

(1) what kind of information, (2) how do you measure that amount of information? (3) CAN it be measured? (4) if it can't be measured, does it exist or not? Lest you think this is rhetorical, subtle things like quantum superposition were theorized to exist long before they were proven, and we're far from figuring out how to measure and use thse subtleties. I'd really like to know what is being picked up. For instance: can your choice of wires eliminate certain information from playback? Presumably that would come as some form of either loss of frequency response at some (?all?) frequencies, or as a distortion which eliminates some information and substitutes in distortion to replace or mask it. Given that we're trying to measure the distortion of a silver wire as differentiated from the distortion of a copper wire, and the signal passes through amplifying devices, whether transistor or valve, with both measurable (and presumably much higher) distortion, and then through speakers with gross distortion compared to the active devices (and presumably resistors and capacitors with their own distortion to account for) how would we ever tell what information we were supposed to get in the first place?

Another thought just struck me. Playback of ANYTHING involves sensing either the position, magnetic orientation, or reflectivity of some playback medium. Actually, there used to be electrical field recording devices, but they've gone by the wayside. It can't get any finer than sensing the positions of individual atoms, can it? We can, with some difficulty, sense the positions of individual atoms with scanning electron force microscopes. Actually, to be correct, we're sensing the exclusion regions of the electron orbitals, as best I remember it, but at this level, the atomic surface looks like a 3d arrangement of marbles of various sizes. Presumably the relative positions of the "marbles" is as much as we're likely to get out from any conceivable present day playback device. To sense this, a playback device has to be atomically sharp in its sensing. Even if we had that, the passage of individual atoms past an atomic scale sensor has to generate a lot of noise that is unlikely to be of audio interest. So even if we had perfect wires, and atom-scale sensors for playback, much of what we'd get would be noise, and a fair amount of that would be at frequencies we can't hear (even on a good 15kHz day) so for pleasant playback, traded off against unvarnished fidel... er - high accuracy we'd be after some kind of filtering to remove all the non-audio junk. Ooops. That's another can of worms, I guess.

I'm completely with you on "it didn't hurt". It's the extra zip/focus/sterility/balanced presentation/detail retrieval/softness/peakiness and so on that I'm having problems with. How do I define those, let alone measure them?
They are all subjective descriptions because most people understand that more readily then there is a 7db peak at 3.2k Hz. Just because you are uncomfortable with those terms because they are not somehow universally standardized with correlating frequencies and spl's doesn't discount there effectiveness in convoying sonic information in an informal setting which this is.

OK. I'm with you. We're being soft, cozy, loose with definitions, just having a few beers, no real, solid definitions involved.

How do I, as an amp maker/fixer/modder make anything useful out of that? Is "silver wire is better" the same as saying "redheads are better"? This forum is at least notionally technical, and as such ought to have some substance underlying a straight statement that something is better than something else. Unless there is that as a basis, it's just as good to say that wire with green insulation sounds better than wire with black-colored insulation, but that you need to keep your wire choices to a balanced insulation color spectrum. Where's the reality to be found?

If you open up even a very expensive amp very few have "special' wire in them, some do use silver but typical it is nothing to write home about so how much the wire you use in a guitar amp effects it's sound is probably very small as I wrote prior; subtle (at best). But to say it has no effect would not be accurate either. Is that sublteness important? That's up to the end user isn't it.

I think the way I'd put it is that lacking a measurable foundation, people do a lot of stuff just because they seem to enjoy whatever it is. They will then go off and try to justify what they do. So if something makes you happy, that's great! Go do it. But some people like [!] to know the numbers.

I will the first to admit that the audio field, especially highend playback, is filled with people who are full of shit and are about making a buck rather then achieving the highest level of reproduction, which is ultimately subjective, because really whatever you like best is what is best for you, regardless of other's perceptions/beliefs and there inability to accept other's values. A lot of people need someone to tell them what is good rather then trusting themselves and make decisions based on marketing rather then performance. That is a big reason I have walked away from that field and decided to focus more on making music.

Good. I like that very much. Please, please, please do not import the hifi tweako mindset into guitar amps. Leave it where it disgusted you, and don't import the ... um... nonsensibilities.

It's bad enough already, with famous guitarists demanding that their amp techs reverse individual resistors in circuit to see which way they sound best. The business of speakers having distortion is very much not rhetorical. It's measurable, and easily. A change of speakers changes things so much that the entire amp sounds different. Silver wire won't help.

how do I measure the various effects so I can reach some predefined goal, rather than just swapping out stuff and hoping for a good result?
It's a bit like cooking, right? Give 10 people the same recipe and you will almost certainly have 10 dishes that taste different. Maybe those difference's are subtle (maybe not) but those differences are what separates good from great.

OK. But don't go on a cooking show and tell people that ground up snail shells from the plains in Nepal will make the result magical.

And great chefs are notorious for not giving away their secrets, to the point that if they tell you the "secret" you can be sure that it's not really the secret.

Sad, had a response typed but you're not worth the time or effort. Funny you equate you "watching" and having the personal ability to "do" as the same thing. Man I watch a lot of F1, I need to give Ferrari a call! The world is flat so keep those fingers in your ears and listening with you eyes R.G. you're the MAN!

[Mark]

Well that didn't end well. Personally, I think speakers and transformers make a lot of difference, that's followed by valves which is followed by components. I think we all agree wiring layout makes more of a difference than the wire and insulation.

I also hear guys telling me resistors sound different but apart from carbon comp noise I don't hear it. I wish someone could demonstrate the different sounds of resistors. I also remember people putting small value caps across the 0.022uF PI input cap in a Marshall 1959 as it affected timbre. I don't hear that one doing the rounds these days.

[andresound]

Just saying

[pdf64]

I think RG may be used to such debates not going well

... In any case these are small capacitances, on the order of a few pF, generally assumed insignificant in the audio frequency range.

I'm pretty sure that on long twisted runs of signal wiring, eg BF 2 channel reverb channel wires to tone stack and back from the vol control, the parasitic capacitance between these wires does audibly affect the response.
I guess that would be much reduced if a screened cable was used for the vol control output, but then that may also affect response too, particularly when the vol control is electrically halfway, and the 'hot to screen' capacitance of the screened cable run would add to the miller capacitance roll off a little.

[sluckey]

He who has the most words is the victor! I still think clear Teflon insulated wire has the most transparency.

[johnnyreece]

I make no claims on the validity or invalidity of any of the previous posters' thoughts, but what I *DO* find interesting is that, often, it seems the physical appearance of the material has a direct relation to the material's supposed effect on sound. For example, solid core described as "more focused" (which, technically, physically it is). Silver being bright, etc. Makes me think of Willy Wonka adding ingredients in the Inventing Room. Amp need some more kick? Put a boot in it!

Excuse the ramblings...just trying to lighten the mood while making a not-so-witty observation.

[M Fowler]

I still respect the opinions of you fine gentleman.
Great group of guys and some gals.

Mark