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Headphone Cables - Do we really need anything beyond copper, OFC at best?

OK1

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This rabbit hole is deep. For many many years, in professional music, I was familiar with OFC - Oxide Free Copper. All my cables were just OFC, nothing more.

The ARTTI T10 came with silver plated copper cables. And I do have one KZ silver plated copper cable, which I bought out of curiosity - not expensive. Thought I was doing well.

Today, I discovered there is more in audiophile land - OCC - Ohno Continuous Cast. Where does it end? One just has to stop somewhere. In professional audio - copper without any trimmings is good enough, and that is what is used to create the music and audio we listen to. Just copper for analog cables, no coatings, of any kind. That is what runs or is installed in the top professional studios and home studios - just copper - yes very likely OFC copper, but nothing more than copper in the cable strands.

Makes me wonder why are we going overboard in enthusiast land - silver coatings, silver cabling, graphene, silver copper alloys, and now OCC.

There's an acronym for this excessiveness - OCD. The audio cables in our studios, radio stations, broadcast houses, mastering suites, post production, all made of just copper, nothing else, coated with insulating material. None of this other excess. The people who produce what we hear use nothing else but copper. Nothing else. So why are we trying to hear it with esoteric materials. like silver and graphene? Ridiculous if you ask me.
 
Makes me wonder why are we going overboard in enthusiast land - silver coatings, silver cabling, graphene, silver copper alloys, and now OCC.
Answer: People are willing to pay money for these things, because it's easy to convince yourself they sound different despite there not being any actual audible difference. Why? Money, in a word.

So why are we trying to hear it with esoteric materials. like silver and graphene? Ridiculous if you ask me.
Yep.
 
Let's make up a fictive scenario.

Some time in the future, say, the year 2065, it's possible to turn a mere conductor (copper or silver or anything) into a superconductor via advanced force field projectors or whatever. This will lower its resistance from a milliohm per meter to virtually zero. The force field projector uses around one megawatt to do its thing. Rich people's households can do this kind of power, using Mr. Fusion in the basement. Mankind acquired this technology from some unlikely friendly aliens or some shit.

There will inevitably be futuristic audiophools who will do this, and swear it provides intergalactic improvements in sound quality. Despite still having human ears.
 
Let's make up a fictive scenario.

Some time in the future, say, the year 2065, it's possible to turn a mere conductor (copper or silver or anything) into a superconductor via advanced force field projectors or whatever. This will lower its resistance from a milliohm per meter to virtually zero. The force field projector uses around one megawatt to do its thing. Rich people's households can do this kind of power, using Mr. Fusion in the basement. Mankind acquired this technology from some unlikely friendly aliens or some shit.

There will inevitably be futuristic audiophools who will do this, and swear it provides intergalactic improvements in sound quality. Despite still having human ears.
When the room temperature superconductor hype was happening a while back, I started a thread on what it could mean for audio if it panned out. (It didn't of course). In the thread, it was not obvious to anyone what you could do with a superconductor that would obviously improve on regular old wires.

And yet we still have people desperately trying to improve on regular wires with slightly different regular wires...
 
When the room temperature superconductor hype was happening a while back, I started a thread on what it could mean for audio if it panned out. (It didn't of course). In the thread, it was not obvious to anyone what you could do with a superconductor that would obviously improve on regular old wires.

And yet we still have people desperately trying to improve on regular wires with slightly different regular wires...
Reminds me of the usual damping factor discussion. Yes, it's a thing, and yes, it does indeed matter - the question is, as always, how much and to what degree. It's tangential here because speaker cable resistance is effectively lowering and limiting an ampfilier's damping factor.

Any beefy amplifier with a low output impedance of a few milliohm can "brake" a swinging big cone of a speaker to a degree we perceive as "really tight bass control". That's relatively simple to achieve, and it really doesn't matter whether that is 10 or 0.5 milliohm. Both result in the effective, perceptually immediate "braking", that is power sink behaviour of an amplifier.

It's simply a matter of "good enough" - above which any further improvement becomes inaudible. Similar to distortion or frequency response. Our ears are really coarse sensors and can't detect anywhere near the levels of "detail" our precision measurement instruments can.
 
  • C10100 – also known as oxygen-free electronic (OFE). This is a 99.99% pure copper with 0.0005% oxygen content. It achieves a minimum 101% IACS conductivity rating. This copper is finished to a final form in a carefully regulated, oxygen-free environment. Silver (Ag) is considered an impurity in the OFE chemical specification. This is also the most expensive of the three grades listed here.
  • C10200 – also known as oxygen-free (OF). While OF is considered oxygen-free, its conductivity rating is no better than the more common ETP grade below. It has a 0.001% oxygen content, 99.95% purity and minimum 100% IACS conductivity. For the purposes of purity percentage, silver (Ag) content is counted as copper (Cu).
  • C11000 – also known as electrolytic-tough-pitch (ETP). This is the most common copper. It is ubiquitous in electrical applications. ETP has a minimum conductivity rating of 100% IACS and is required to be 99.9% pure. It has 0.02% to 0.04% oxygen content (typical). Most ETP sold today meets or exceeds the 101% IACS specification. As with OF copper, silver (Ag) content is counted as copper (Cu) for purity purposes.
The high-end speaker wire industry markets oxygen-free copper as having enhanced conductivity or other electrical properties that are supposedly advantageous to audio signal transmission. In fact, conductivity specifications for common C11000 (ETP) and higher-cost C10200 oxygen-free (OF) coppers are identical and even the much more expensive C10100 has only a one-percent higher conductivity—insignificant in audio applications.

OFC is nevertheless sold for both audio and video signals in audio playback systems and home cinema.


JSmith
 
Our ears are really coarse sensors and can't detect anywhere near the levels of "detail" our precision measurement instruments can.
Bingo. The subjectivist / snake oil / audiophool ecosystem depends on the implicit assumption that human hearing has effectively infinite resolution. I mean, you have Rob Watts going around saying he can hear artifacts at -300dB... which would also imply he could literally hear someone fart from across state lines. It's just beyond foolish.

It's a good thing these people aren't running wild in the TV arena also, otherwise we'd have these goofballs watching VHS tapes on screens with a color gamut that goes from infrared to X-ray.
 
3 different cables that the maker claims they would different "sound signatures" graphing exactly the same
 

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Bingo. The subjectivist / snake oil / audiophool ecosystem depends on the implicit assumption that human hearing has effectively infinite resolution. I mean, you have Rob Watts going around saying he can hear artifacts at -300dB... which would also imply he could literally hear someone fart from across state lines. It's just beyond foolish.

It's a good thing these people aren't running wild in the TV arena also, otherwise we'd have these goofballs watching VHS tapes on screens with a color gamut that goes from infrared to X-ray.
Those same snake oil assumptions love to claim "infinite resolution" of so called "analog" systems, namely vinyl and tape. While in reality the physically (PVC and tape grain) dynamic resolution of it can't exceed 12bit digital equivalent, and 24/96 digital systems from 25 years ago can even capture all the unwanted noise and distortion in all its glorious detail. :D
 
The real issues with headphone cables are flexibility and microphonics. The metal used for the wire doesn't count as much as those two factors. I've had good luck with cheap replacements from Amazon for two of my Sennheiser headphones.
 
Bingo. The subjectivist / snake oil / audiophool ecosystem depends on the implicit assumption that human hearing has effectively infinite resolution. I mean, you have Rob Watts going around saying he can hear artifacts at -300dB... which would also imply he could literally hear someone fart from across state lines. It's just beyond foolish.

It's a good thing these people aren't running wild in the TV arena also, otherwise we'd have these goofballs watching VHS tapes on screens with a color gamut that goes from infrared to X-ray.

Hmm lets open headphones: Tiny laminated copper wires with bad soldering jobs and drivers with copper-clad aluminum coils.
 
This rabbit hole is deep. For many many years, in professional music, I was familiar with OFC - Oxide Free Copper. All my cables were just OFC, nothing more.

The ARTTI T10 came with silver plated copper cables. And I do have one KZ silver plated copper cable, which I bought out of curiosity - not expensive. Thought I was doing well.

Today, I discovered there is more in audiophile land - OCC - Ohno Continuous Cast. Where does it end? One just has to stop somewhere. In professional audio - copper without any trimmings is good enough, and that is what is used to create the music and audio we listen to. Just copper for analog cables, no coatings, of any kind. That is what runs or is installed in the top professional studios and home studios - just copper - yes very likely OFC copper, but nothing more than copper in the cable strands.

Makes me wonder why are we going overboard in enthusiast land - silver coatings, silver cabling, graphene, silver copper alloys, and now OCC.

There's an acronym for this excessiveness - OCD. The audio cables in our studios, radio stations, broadcast houses, mastering suites, post production, all made of just copper, nothing else, coated with insulating material. None of this other excess. The people who produce what we hear use nothing else but copper. Nothing else. So why are we trying to hear it with esoteric materials. like silver and graphene? Ridiculous if you ask me.
You are simply being ripped off.
OCC has been the standard in metal extraction for over 30 years, including for copper.
OFC is simply low-oxygen copper, produced using the OCC process, among other things.
Nowadays, all stranded wires (cables) are actually made from OFC copper that has been extracted using the OCC process, simply because it makes production easier and cheaper.

This means that you can assume that even a cheap stranded cable from an electronics discounter is OFC and OCC.

Every manufacturer that advertises particularly oxygen-free copper must be able to prove this. No manufacturer produces these special types without laboratory tests and certificates.
If they can't, it's just common material.

Tin plating, silver plating and nickel plating only serve as protection for copper and are extremely thin.
 
Makes me wonder why are we going overboard in enthusiast land - silver coatings, silver cabling, graphene, silver copper alloys, and now OCC.
By the way, the OCC cow has been around since the early 90s, it is absolutely nothing new.

And to cover another topic. Monocrystalline copper is just as much nonsense and a rip-off.

In 2018, a team of researchers succeeded for the first time in producing a palm-sized piece of monocrystaline copper foil (wafer-thin). Small-scale industrial production is still decades away, and cables are even further away.
Draw your own conclusions before you spend money on monocrystalline copper cables.
 
Those same snake oil assumptions love to claim "infinite resolution" of so called "analog" systems, namely vinyl and tape.
Yep... just a misunderstanding of the concept of resolution, they think because something is not quantized it's magic?
 
Yep... just a misunderstanding of the concept of resolution, they think because something is not quantized it's magic?
That's the thing: vinyl and tape are indeed quantised, by physical things such as the size of PVC molecules and crystal density on the tape.

"Analog" as in "stepless" is a concept, not physical reality.
 
You are simply being ripped off.
OCC has been the standard in metal extraction for over 30 years, including for copper.
OFC is simply low-oxygen copper, produced using the OCC process, among other things.
Nowadays, all stranded wires (cables) are actually made from OFC copper that has been extracted using the OCC process, simply because it makes production easier and cheaper.

This means that you can assume that even a cheap stranded cable from an electronics discounter is OFC and OCC.

Every manufacturer that advertises particularly oxygen-free copper must be able to prove this. No manufacturer produces these special types without laboratory tests and certificates.
If they can't, it's just common material.

Tin plating, silver plating and nickel plating only serve as protection for copper and are extremely thin.
Not that ETP is audibly different either.
 
That's the thing: vinyl and tape are indeed quantised, by physical things such as the size of PVC molecules and crystal density on the tape.

"Analog" as in "stepless" is a concept, not physical reality.

I once replaced a n-type RF connector on a RG58 cable with corroded outer braiding and the marine VHF radio still worked fine with down to -100dBm RSSI.

Cost? $5.

How many headphone users hear theirs at 0.0000000000001W?
 
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