Sapphire Wire

[aarond]

Any one in line for the Sapphire superconducting loudspeaker wires Superconducting Wire Made From Sapphire

 

[Adam]

One of the things that make copper wires inefficient is overheating. Due to electrical resistance found in the metal, some of the energy that flows through the cables is castoff and wasted, causing the wires to heat up. But with superconductors, there is no resistance.

A self-contained cooling system, which requires a constant flow of liquid nitrogen,keeps the wire in its superconducting state.

I might as well. I'm already on Amazon's Subscribe and Save program for liquid nitrogen tanks.

I'd like to see the resource trade study of energy saved due to electrical efficiency versus energy required to create, store, and distribute liquid nitrogen over vast distances to keep the wires cold. I'm also curious how sapphire compares to copper at ambient temperature, so as to know the ramifications of a coolant system failure.

It cracks me up to read that sapphire won't overheat because of lower resistance...which is achieved by actively cooling it to cryogenic temperatures.

 

[highfigh]

From Wiki, regarding the use of sapphire in CMOS chips, "The reason for choosing wafers of artificial sapphire, rather than some of other substance, for these substrates is that sapphire has a quite low conductivity for electricity, but a much-higher conductivity for heat. Thus, sapphire provides good electrical insulation, while at the same time doing a good job at helping to conduct away the significant heat that is generated in all operating integrated circuits.".

And this makes it a good candidate for speaker wire, how? The article says nothing about using it for speaker wire, it's for power cabling. I'd like to see how large or small the test wires are.

ANY conductor resists electron flow to a certain extent but unless the whole circuit is super-conductive, it's a lost cause to only use this for speaker wire. It's just friction. Probably better to use SC inside of the equipment where processing and amplification are done.

 

[aarond]

But, I'm sure that audioquest will have a pair of $10k sapphire speaker wires with in 5 years and maybe blose will have a sapphire line of speakers.