Jens and all,
I listened to Jens' system and had an audio-religious experience. Absolutely wonderful, and Jens uses silver plated copper interconnects that he swears by. Given the awesome sound of his system I would be the last person to say that it can't be done, or to argue with a man who has built such a system. I hope to try some of his wire in my system someday. Jon Risch, in one of his posts on AA, made a very interesting comment about mixing metals (I assume copper and silver) in interconnects: two different metals used in series (I suppose that he means silver = hot, copper = return or the reverse) "tends to bring out the worst characteristics of both metals" while using them in parallel (copper + silver hots, copper + silver returns, I suppose) sounds better. I e-mailed him to ask for more detail, never got an answer. I do have some nice silver and copper wire on hand, and when the GK-1R is complete, I may try some braids, twists, helicies, etc. to see what I can hear.
Metallurgy is a black art... the amazing properties of Damascus swords were an absolute mystery until a few years ago when a few reasonable hypotheses emerged (and I'm sure that it's still not entirely understood). So, I would argue that there are many ways to put ingredients together into a pot, but only some taste good, and only a few are truly wonderful. Not all silver-plated copper is created equal, I'll bet.
My post was not about interconnects, however. All I said was that I've struggled to understand what could be happening in power runs at mains frequencies (or even DC) that could inject higher frequency garbage into an audio circuit. Hugh's "grain-boundary diode" hypothesis for copper/silver systems is one way that could happen, and I found it an interesting idea. Someday, if/when life is running at a lot slower pace, it would be a very interesting thing to study.
Peter
