crossover "break in" time? (Off Topic)

by Eddie @, Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 19:33 (6218 days ago) @ MikeH

Hello Mike,

I am not an electrical engineer, but I try for already a long time to find scientific reasons for audible differences. This is a niche market as you probably experienced.


Nothing will change in a well made inductor or resistor, I can only assume
it is a chemical change inside the capacitors. If this is the case I expect
they will sound good for a while then continue to "break in" until they
stop working properly.

My experience with resistors is indeed that they do not need braking in. What I once experienced is that resistors changed value slowly due to overheating. Capacitors and cables do change in time. About capacitors I can say that they are much more complicated than people realize. Besides capacitance they have resitance, inductance, leak current, dielectric losses and ..? The dielectric properties usually change considerably with temperature and life time. There is almost no research on the behavior of capacitors for high-end audio. The only paper that I once saw was a measurement of the frequency response of power supply capacitors. In this test Black Gates did not appear superior above other high quality types, such as Elna Cerafine. I once made the test in my amp which changing one Elna for one Black Gate and the last one sounded a LOT better.

With cables the explanation is even more difficult. More measurements are avalable on their resistance, inductance, capacitance and frequency characteristics, but these have very little correlation with the percieved sound quality. One small company in the Netherlands, Siltech, tries seriously to investigate cables for audio applications. They claim that the structure of the cristals of the conductors is an important factor for the transmission of very low voltages. They test their cables down to 1 nanovolt! This is required for low level details. Silver cables are better in this respect than copper ones. Silver with 1% gold is even better because the gold molecules fill the space between the silver cristallytes. The cristal structure of a wire is severely altered when a cable is taken out and put back and it seems to last a long time before it is settled again for optimum performance.

Another story that I heard a few times is that contact potentials can strongly influence the performance of a cable. For this reason some people prefer to have the output chain of the amplifier including the cables, connectors, voice coil etc. all from pure silver. The most expensive Audio Note equipment is made this way. However, good equipment can also be made with copper wire, Bert can demonstrate that for you.

The conclusion remain that very little investigations have been performed (because it is too expensive?). Practically all information comes from hear-say and trial and error and, of course, lots of nonsense is spread around on this matter. Well, that leaves something for us to find out.


Kind regards,
Eddie

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