Myth #8: Silver plating makes cables better.
This is another touchy subject, so we will just deal with facts without interjecting too much opinion.
Silver plating the conductors of cables has become very popular, since you can allegedly get the gain of using silver conductors without the cost of pure silver conductors. Since silver is a better conductor than copper, this makes sense. This gain is typically explained by the phenomenon of “skin effect”. Basically speaking, skin effect happens when signals only use the outside (or “skin) of a conductor as they ride down the wire. So, the argument is that if your signals are only using the “skin” of the wire, silver plating is a great thing since your signal will ride down the plating, and you will not have the added expense of using silver for the core of the wire, since it is not used anyway.
That all sounds nice, but as usual, the truth is going to really wreck a great story. The fact of the matter is that skin effect does exist. In fact, it is based on the signal frequency. That is, the higher the frequency of the signal, the less the “skin depth” (how far the signal goes into the conductor) will be. So, once you reach a certain threshold, silver plating will be great because the skin depth of the signal will be the same as the depth of the plating.
However, there is a problem. In order for this to be a reality, the frequency of the signal will need to be well north of 1 GHz (billions of hertz) to make this a reality. In consumer audio and video, the highest frequency application is HDTV video, which is about 33 MHz (millions of hertz). As you can see, even the highest frequency application is still 20 times too low of a frequency to take advantage of silver plating. As another example, analog audio (e.g. Audio Interconnects) only run in the KHz (thousands of hertz).
OK, so what happens when you run a signal whose frequency is too low to take advantage of skin effect? What happens is you have the signal using two different conductor materials for its transmission. You have one part of the signal (usually the highest frequency portion of the signal, typically the highest treble in audio) using the silver plating and the rest of the signal uses whatever the core is made out of. So, you have two different conductors handling different parts of the signal. Since silver is a better conductor than copper (most typically used as the core, but we have seen silver plated steel conductors), the portion of the signal that is using the silver will get an artificial boost. In audio terms, this is called a high-pass filter. That is, the high portion of the signal is passing through fine while the lower portion of the signal (e.g. midrange and bass) is being cut. With this type of situation, what you usually end up hearing is audio that is biased towards the highs (this is usually called “bright” or “tinny”).
However, this is not necessarily bad. It just totally goes against our philosophy of how to build a great cable. If you find that your system is lacking in high-end energy (it just sounds dead or dull), then one of these cables may make your system sound better to you. Conversely, though, if your system is balanced or already sounds a little “bright “ to you, silver plated cables could be a nightmare.
