From;

http://www.frozensolidaudio.com/Freezing%20Issue.htm


"The speaker cables arrived first. Max [Townshend] delivered them in person (together with a car-full of Seismic Sink products, of which more on another occasion) so that we could listen to the differences together. Townshend cables already use annealed copper because Max had found that it sounds better: DCT is, in effect, a super annealing process, and it was quickly apparent that the cable with the cryo-copper sounded better still. I've now done the comparison many times, and the difference continues to astound me. The DCT cable has greater resolution and a notably airier, more natural sound - to such an extent that, having heard it for himself, Max returned home and immediately arranged for a first batch of copper to go to Frozen Solid for treatment. Cryo versions of his cables will be available by the time you read this.

Because DCT has the effect of reducing copper's resistance somewhat, it was important to check that the audible differences could not be explained away by small changes in frequency response at the loudspeaker terminals. To test for this I used MLSSA to measure the difference when using the two cables. You can see the outcome in Fig 1. MLSSA gives a rather noisy plot at this resolution (I could have used smoothing to disguise it) but even so it is clear that the disparity in frequency response is comfortably within +/ - 0.01dB across the entire audible frequency range - much too small a difference to account for the significant change in sound quality.

If anything the interconnect cables, when they arrived a little later proved even greater a revelation than the speaker cables. Max had identified them as A, B and C, and only when I told him that I vastly preferred pair C over the other two did he confirm that this was indeed the cryogenically treated set. Once again, the sound of the treated cables was characterized by manifestly superior transparency. Music was dynamic in a way that simply eluded the other two cables (one annealed, the other not) - more finely etched and yet more weighty and punchy too.

Delighted as I am with the outcome of this experiment (although I don't imagine for one moment it will change the minds of those who regard cables sonics as a figment of others' imaginations) I have now to concede, rather like Scott trudging forlornly up to the South Pole that someone got there before me. While the copper was with Frozen Solid being treated, I stumbled across a Pearl advert in a 1993 issue of Glass Audio that mentioned cryogenic treatment of vacuum tubes.

Some web searching soon revealed that Ed Meitner was the man behind this; that he had performed similar experiments to mine with cables, and a great deal else besides, a decade and more ago; and that he'd actually sold cryogenically treated cables for a while under the Museatex brand. For some obscure reason this all passed me by at the time, despite a fair few column inches being devoted to the subject in magazines like. Stereophile [GET THEE HENCE!].


I tracked Ed down to his company EMM Labs in Calgary Canada and spoke to him on the telephone about his many experiments with DCT and why his pioneering work has slowly slipped from view. You can read what he told me in the accompanying panel. I must say even after that conversation, I remain puzzled. Having heard for myself the astonishing effect of cryogenically treating the copper in speaker and interconnect cables, I can't imagine how this process and its benefits could fade into obscurity. As Ed Meitner himself says, it can't be due to cost because - in the context of high-end gear, at any rate - it is swamped by all those digits in the price tag. Although Meitner still uses cryogenic treatment himself, for everyone else in the audio industry it appears to have been a case of NIH (not invented here) or maybe IDU (I don't understand). Perhaps things will be different this second time around. And before you ask, yes - I will be striving to find some way of quantifying the sonic difference DCT so obviously makes.
Ed Meitner of EMM Labs

INTERVIEW

Here Ed Meitner of EMM Labs talks about his pioneering work with cryogenic treatment.

'We know what copper looks like under heavy magnification - it has a very erratic lattice structure, and we know that this comes from the way it is made. Most materials come from a liquid and are shocked, more or less, into a solid. So the lattice structure of the material isn't in its natural state. What this does is produce stress, residual stress.

'If you treat the material at low temperatures, where the strength of the atomic bonds starts to diminish it reverts to the natural crystal structure. So this process relieves the residual stress. It is a function of temperature and time. The absolute temperature doesn't matter very much, but if you only go down to, say, -200ºF it may take several weeks. If we take it down to liquid nitrogen temperatures then it happens much faster. Our treatment time for copper was 12 hours on the way down, 12 hours soak, and 12 hours back. You don't want to go too fast: then you put thermal stresses into the material and break it."

WHy have I posted this?

Firstly, Mr. Howard claims to have easily discerned the 'frozen' interconnects - to have blind-tested them.

Secondly, I think de-stressed or 'relaxed' conductors sound like a good idea. I've always treated cables (especially headphone cords, which obviously get handled a lot)) carefully, for this reason

bring it on.

R.

edit; Moved to 'hardware'? I guess that's reasonable.

What amazes me is that these breakthroughs in physics only happen in the audio world and are only reported in the popular or trade press. Could it be a conspiracy in the scientific world? Has to be. It is the only logical explanation. Move over Einstein.

Not copper. The disorganized lattice structure of copper comes from it's production, yes, but not a "shock". The most energy efficient way to refine pure (99.97%) copper from blister copper is to place a thin sheet of pure copper into a chamber with copper sulphate and sulphuric acid, then connect it to the positive side of a power source to form a positive terminal (anode) and use electrolysis to cause the copper from the anode to enter the solution (become aqueous) and then stick to the cathode (negative terminal) in the form of copper cations (positively charged ions).

Since the copper cations have been "stuck" to the cathode individually the lattice structure is indeed rather disorganised. I'm very sceptical that this would significantly (audibly) effect AC frequencies in the audible range. I don't think you'd see differences in electron transfer outside of physics labs.

Edit: I found a good Wikipedia article offering a more in depth explanation here. The stage I'm referring to is electrorefining.

What else might it be applicable to?

R.

edit> PS, I'm not that impressed by Einstein. Theoreticans are crap, get all the glory, do none of the work. I prefer empirical science and engineering - Faraday, Tesla, Birkeland et al, real contributors.

Using residual stress to explain differences in audio cables is pretty novel. In fact, it's exceedingly rare to hear of residual stress outside of concrete and welding applications.

Well, as far as some are concerned; what differences?

To put my question to Boojum another way;- in what other application might the molecular structure of a a conductor (copper, in this case) make any measurable or perceptable differerence?

R.

Almost everyone here has relatively low-end audio gear, so even if what this guy is saying is correct it won't help the users of this forum. This sort of thing just incites zealotry.

Maybe you're right. At least you didn't flat-out call me a troll, thanks.

But my gear is 'low end' in the sense that it's all old-ish, bought 2nd hand and cheap.

Perhaps one thing people might take from this is:- don't brutalise yer cables.

As I said, it's something I do, and always have - intuitive kind of thing.

R.

edit; I mean, it's something I don't do. Sheeit, I'm such a pedant.

If the change described is really that audible, it would show up on a large number of HA users' systems.

@ RockFan. OK, no more tongue-in-cheek. I think the guy is a BS'er, pure and simple. That is why these "amazing breakthroughs" in audio never appear in scientific journals. Hello? Unless, of course, you believe there is some sort of organised conspiracy in the scientific world to discredit these geniuses who can discover this stuff with their ears and liquid nitrogen. Yeah, right.

Oh my god! How amazing that the pair of cables the guy said he preferred was revealed by the guy selling the freezing service as the treated pair!

I wish I could put my conscience aside long enough to steal money through audiophile treatments like this.

Impossible to say, the article did not explain how freezing the cable made it sound better in terms of electron transfer, merely that it had a positive effect on the sound.

Their blind test proceedure is also highly dubious, partly because it isn't a double blind test (the examiner knows which is which), but mainly because the examiner is trying to sell the cables they are testing.

Seconded - they don't appear because they aren't breakthroughs at at. They'd be the laughing stock of any scientific journal.

Firstly, I fail to see how cooling copper relieves stresses, every other metal and technique invloves heat not cold. Secondly, even if it does somehow do so, surely any working of it (mechanically) will cause stress to be re-introduced? Even the application of the rather neccessary insulation will undo the process. Thirdly, it's interesting to see that the frequency responses were the same to wihin 0.01dB (strange that, isn't it!) yet the differences were clearly audible?

The usual cable-voodoo and tosh...IMO

I'm not that much into electric science but I do understand that a near-supraconductor (as produced by freezing cables with e.g. liguid nitrogen) won't show a noticeable DC resistance (or a significantly reduced one) which could be audible ... if cable lengths would exceed some 1000 metres.

I seriously doubt that freezing cables to some 100K (producing a near-supraconductor) will make any difference on the standard 3-5m speaker cable with 'normal' speaker voltages and currents.

What I do not know is whether deep-frozen cables show the same inductive or capacitive resistance as room-temeperature cables (I doubt that impedance is influenced by low temperatures the same way as DC resistance is audible) ... if not, audible differences would be much more probable ...

I have some doubt in the way that specific blind test has been carried out, though ...

JeanLuc - These aren't cables that are at low temperatures while they're being used for audio. That would be believable. These are cables that have been exposed to some very low temperature and held there for a period of time, but now are room temperature again. Supposedly the low temperatures have caused internal changes to the copper.

Which is BS by the way. "The strength of atomic bonds starts to diminish" at low temperatures? Bull. Low temperatures means less atomic movement, there's not going to be any changes to the crystal structure.

Superconductivity certainly has some interesting properties, but it only occours while the material is at extremely low temperatures. For simple metals, their temperature has to be maintained at around 5K, which is -268 degrees Celcius (-450 degrees Fahrenheit). You won't find a critical temperature for copper listed anywhere because nobody has ever achieved superconductivity using pure copper. Considering they've tested Titanium to superconduct at 0.39K, it's unlikely pure copper superconducts at any temperature (remembering that 0K is absolute zero).

These cables were tested at room temperature after being frozen, not during the freezing.

Freezing to 100K won't cause any known material to superconduct. The highest known critical temperature is 39K for magnesium diboride. Freezing pure copper to 100K may reduce DC resistance but whether it will audiably change AC properties at below radio frequencies is unknown.

!!! useless pendantic information !!!

The highest temperature superconductor known are the exotic ceramics. The current record holder is HgTlBaCaCuO, with a critical temperature of 138K. MgB2 is the highest temperature type-1 superconductor; that is it obeys the BCS thoery of supermagnatism. The high temperature superconductors based on various ceramic oxides are called type-2, and we still don't know why or how they superconduct. That makes it hard to say what the highest possible temperature is, and reduces the whole thing to a lot of trial and error experimentation.

The superconductor that is most used today is YBCO, yttrium barium copper oxide. It superconducts at 94K, which is important because it can be cooled with liquid nitrogen. I believe it is used in prefrence to some others with higher allowed temperatures because of easier manufacturing and less brittle mechanics.

That would mean YBaCuO

Of course it is bullshit, hmmm lets see - freeze the cable it will low its resistance and when it is returned to normal temperature it will return to the old resistance, scientifically you could prove that, just funny how science cannot prove a warmer, more natural sound...

Until the next snake oil remedy...

I was referring to conventional superconductors, that is ones that are explainable with BCS theory as you said.

Yes, the chemical formula is YBa2Cu3O7. But it is abbreviated YBCO in normal usage as the common name. There are in fact at least three different superconductors that use variant amounts of those four elements. I think "YBCO" may be sort a name for it as a product, to distinguish it from the others... But I'm just an interested layman.

Ah. Actually, according to superconductors.org, MgB is a type 2 so it doesn't use standard BCS theory either. But they have seem to have explained how MgB works, the "two energy gap" theory. It seems that it is different than all the high temp perovskite / ceramic superconductors. MgB isn't in wide use yet, but it is slated to replace most of the standard superconductors used in medical and scientific devices, like MRI. It still required liquid helium, but that's no different than the current ones.

---
Here's a different interesting bit of materials science: A while back I read an article about nanocrystaline copper. An engineer was experimenting with flash-freezing molten copper, and found that the micro crystal structure produced had very different physical properties, like strength, ductility, hardness. There wasn't anything about electrical changes, so I assumed that was the same. Any bets on how long it will be before someone tries to sell nanocrystal wire with amazing new audio claims?

" Any bets on how long it will be before someone tries to sell nanocrystal wire with amazing"


Actually, I just bought some of those as speaker cables. They sound so much warmer than the others I used. ROTFLMAO

Some type 2 superconductors are regarded as conventional, even though they may not strictly follow BCS theory, provided they can be explained with extensions. I should have said in my post "that is ones that are explainable with BCS theory and extensions".

The criteria for type 2 superconductors is an extremely small amount of resistance which appears if a strong current is applied in tandem with a strong magnetic field. The niobium-titanium alloy used in MRI devices is a type 2 but is considered conventional.

The sad thing is that Meitner is highly respected for some of his other work (DSD converter development) -- although I'd note that few if any of the claims for his (or any other high-end products) are ever properly tested. It's a very echo-chamber culture, high-end.

Whats puzzling to me is that every few months for the last 30 years a new wire has shown up that is far superior to the existing products, say 50 generations of great improvements, but I don't think even the most diehard of subjectivist would claim those "great improvements" have stacked any sense. If B is better than A, and C is better than B, by the time you get to Z it should be orgasmic compared to A, a difference that would make a double blind test so easy to pass.

Is it any wonder that I listen the most these days to 192k MP3 in my car through factory speakers?

There's a guy in NYC who does cryogenics. He freezes everything from pistons to brass musical instruments of the philharmonic. There was an article about him in the NY Times a number of years back.

His calling card is a cryogenically-treated disposable razor. According to the Times author, the blade stays sharp for a VERY long time.

I have no doubt that cryogenics does help some materials, but audio stuff...???

There might be something to this. Responses have taken one of two forms:
1) attack the theory behind the apparent "breakthrough"
2) claim that the blind-testing is dubious

Note that even if the theory is wrong, there may be some advance. There are numerous training methods for elite runners/cyclists/etc. that were derived under mistaken presuppositions... but the work. For some of them, exercise science has learned why they work; others remain mysterious but work nonetheless. My point being that it's possible this treatment has some effect that's noticeable, even if we don't know why.

The blind-testing does seem to be dubious. But I'm not ready to write it off. I'd like to know if Mr. Howard could consistently identify the cryogenically-treated cable as sounding better, in a double-blind environment. I'm open to the possibility that he could. Maybe I've just not been around "real" audiophiles enough to be extremely cynical...

OK one elementary physics question. How are such low temperatures of 1.5K achieved?

If there is any audible effect, shouldn't the difference also be measurable?

Anyway, can't it be included in the terms of service or something that the audio transmission properties of cables are not to be discussed on HA?
I seriously don't see the point if neither side will ever agree with the other. It's not a debate anymore, but an ordinary war, not matter how intellectual or technical the invididual arguments are. The pattern in the bigger picture still strikes me as childish.

No. Unless a topic discusses something which is illegal, or otherwise dangerous to the longevity of HA, or unless it is against one of the other rules designed to keep the discussion civil (in the sense of being non-threatening to individuals and stuff like that), then it should not be banned.

Banning a topic from discussion goes against the principles of rational argumentation that this community strives for, and which I very much believe in myself. Taking that approach, like some so-called audiophile sites do when they ban the discussion of double blind testing topics, seems to me to be quite foolish and heavy handed, and it points to the fact that one has no reasoned response to a topic and so just resorts to banishment in order to hide such a weakness.

There's no shortage of people on this board who can see through the snake oil and who have important criticisms to make of such things. Other people, who lack a skeptical mentality, would do well to be exposed to these arguments, even if the "other side" will never concede failure when their nonsense has been exposed. At least some people will learn something.

At the moment, it doesn't seem to me that HA is in any danger of being overcome by the more traditional "audiophile" mentality, so one can't really use that as an excuse for banning such topics either.



There will always be someone who you can't convince, but that doesn't mean that the majority of people won't come to understand why your argument is better than the "other side." For instance, there are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, or that the Earth and the universe are only a few thousand years old, or that we never landed on the moon, or that there is some sort of vast alien coverup conspiracy, or that psychics are for real, or that homeopathy works, or even that "audiophiles" with their exotic cables, quantum clips, rainbow foils, special creams, and green markers are on to something......

If I put my $7.00 interconnects and speaker cables into my freezer for a few days, would they help the sound quality just a bit, maybe?

Sorry Dibrom, i was being cynical instead of serious. It's just that the discussion tires me, it somewhat annoys me, one of the reasons i like HA is the relative lack of "audiophile" discussions. And this specific topic is one that keeps coming back all the time it seems.

Good post, you're absolutely right about it, i hadn't thought about the people who may be less sceptical. Does make it somewhat byblical though, Heaven, hell, and both sides trying to win the souls of those on the earth that's in between

Sinistarr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cooling_technology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryocoolers Not the most useful wikipedia pages, but it at least gives you some names to google for.

[quote=Nero,Sep 22 2005, 04:29 PM]
If I put my $7.00 interconnects and speaker cables into my freezer for a few days, would they help the sound quality just a bit, maybe?

Yes, they will sound like $8 cables.

Sorry to make a meaningless post, but this is funny as hell, and I have to say so.

Liquid helium in a dilution refrigerator can reach temperatures of just a few millikelvin above absolute zero.

The text says "only when I told him that I vastly preferred pair C over the other two did he confirm that this was indeed the cryogenically treated set."

That's all. This is by no means what we call a significant ABX test.
p is 33 %

Which sound exactly like $1000 cables.

</flamebait>

I see a lot of opinion here and little fact. I see attempts to smear a man as a bullshitter, but not facts. I see inferences about the molecular structure of copper for crying out loud! Copper is a metal. It has no molecular structure!!! Metals are crystalline in structure. They have no molecular structure.




Copper wire is drawn and cold worked and subjected to all sorts of heat cycles. It is not used in the state in which is described there.

The fact is that cryogenic processing is a valid process recognized by the Cryogenic Society of America and ASM International. It seems to me that if you are going to put an idea down you ought to at least do some experimentation with it so you know what you are talking about. Maybe you ought to spend $15.00 to have a cable treated, listen to it next to its untreated twin, and then be able to talk about what you heard or didn't hear. No responsible scientist goes around saying something cannot happen based on total ignorance of the subject. Molecular structure indeed.!!

If it only costs $15 for treatment of a single cable I will gladly pay for 3 cables (Quail power cord + 2 RS Gold interconnects). Got any recommendations?

These articles help explain why it makes a difference in steels, especially cutting steels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martensite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austenite

Here's a fun little bunch of pages that step through one method and an application for it. No application for the application as of yet, I am afraid to say.

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/how_its_made.html

Yes, you are right, but it does not explain why brake rotors last three times as long. Brake rotors are pearlitic cast iron and contain no martensite.

Hee hee, you just wanted to see me have to work for my dinner, didn't you? ;)

Alright, lets build a reading list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel
The Wikipedia entry on steel. Good for some basic background information, including the content of cast iron in relation to what is commonly called steel. An offshoot article attached to this covers the pearlite structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearlite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_iron
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2001/adi/cast.iron.html
Descriptions of cast iron. The second link, near the bottom of its first section, is quite interesting. A quick comment on improvements made with banite/pearlite structures.

http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2004/...martensite.html
A little bit more on the process of tempering Martensite, and it's applications. Of note are high temperature pipes for extracting oil undergoing double tempering.

http://www.bso.uiuc.edu/~chillar/Cryogenic...entofMetals.pdf
An interesting read, describing tests I would like to try out for myself, if I ever get the equipment to do so. Of special interest to the topic at large are tests 5 and onwards.

http://lennon.pub.csufresno.edu/~rlk16/cryo.html#Overview
So by my basic understanding of the current theory, a carbon/ferrous alloy (cast iron, steel, etc.) gains additional toughness when cryogenically treated mostly because the carbon atoms trapped during tempering are allowed to layer up in the now-open spaces between the ferrous bits. I had a nice link showing the more uniform structure under an electron microscope, but I can't seem to find it right now. But my understanding is that the more uniform ordering of the various structures inside the alloy give it better self-reinforcement, trading off strength in some areas for increases in others. While the break discs are highly heat resistant and do not crack as easily, when they hit their stress limit they do not deform but simply snap like cold taffy. But the stress limit is so bloody high that it's not much of a problem. With all of that, keep in mind mine is a derivative understanding of the process from other peoples works, and that this is still an emerging side of modern metallurgy.


Additional reading I haven't posted links to above:
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2002/martensite.html
http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2003/Lattices/iron.html

I thought you were talking about copper wires?

I'm not; I'm trying to cover cryogenic treatments in general and their effects in steels and cast irons, which is where I feel most comfortable presenting evidence on the matter. In one of the papers above, the effects of treatment on copper are noted (tests 5 onwards) but no mention is made of any electrical effects tested.

I note that since the best informed people in this thread (regarding audio properties of hifi cables) have linked the most conclusive evidence* from studies that prove inexpensive standard cable types can be and usualy are completely audibly transparent, any real difference in sound between such identified cables and 'special ones' is due to audible distortion introduced by whatever 'special' properties they possess.
So to be clear, if we are not to contradict what we already know about the audible transparency of normal cables, we are investigating whether it is possible that cryogenic treatment could audibly distort the performance of normal cables, in a way which could be subjectively interpreted as 'sounding better' (even though its technicaly most desirable for cables to have no effect on sound at all)

*edit oops elsewhere (WigiWam Thread)
(and many more at HA)

re: http://www.bso.uiuc.edu/~chillar/Cryogenic...entofMetals.pdf

I found their conclusions to have little or nothing to do with the experiment. They formed conclusions about residual stresses, etc and did not measure them. I've never seen this paper before, but will look into it. I sent a copy to the ASM Cryogenics Committee's library. The rest of your posts were pretty interesting from a metallurgical standpoint and I printed some to read with lunch.

ChiChung:
Columus did discover land west of Spain whether you want to believe it or not. The problem you have is that any "readout" of a recorded sound has to go through an electrical circuit of some sort. Therefore what you have proven is that copper cables distort the same as the cables originally used.

Well warbird, normal cables are securely documented and properly understood to be audibly transparent whether you want to believe it or not I can believe in all sorts of things, what I know is something that is shown to be 100% audibly transparent cannot be improved upon regarding its audible transparency, other physical properties are a different matter.

Scientific enquiry should be open minded and free of prejudice, most importantly not dismiss any of the facts, the most accessibly solvent fact for here to deal with to understand the requirements of cable for audio is that normal cables have been repeatly shown to be entirely transparent to audible performance. That observable fact insists that until humans hearing ability or some natural laws change , if you detect a difference in the sound of a 'special' cable, from the sound of an adequately specified normal cable, it is due to distortion introduced by the special one.

Historical analogies illustrating how people can be stuck in their ways - cut both ways warbird. Could you be the one who is protecting your experience from real evidence which is before you now?

Happens to us all, if we are willing to learn

Surprised to see this bumped after so long.

Actually I was the original poster and devil's advocate, the reference to copper's 'molecular structure' was mine, so despite the pedantry, thanks for the correction. What I was suggesting is that the change in CDT cables might make little difference except in the context of audio cables.

As you say, a lot of opinion as usual (dogma, basically), but what many of the knee-jerkers fail to grasp is that cryogenic treatment is by no means an expensive or exotic process.

I happen to own a Townshend Rock, I've met Max Townshend several times and, I have to say, take a very dim view of the lack of respect shown here.

He's someone who's worked his arse off in the audio industry for nearly three decades, produced many univerally revered pieces of equipment, and I can assure those who know squat about him or his work, he is as pragmatic, honest, open-minded and empirical an engineer as you could ever meet.

[/rant]

R.

Respect for Mr Townsend cant with compete with what I read as a generously informed consensus at HA that this treatment is not necessary to produce transparent audio cabling, so I posit' it cannot sound better in someway without actualy being worse in transparency terms.
Nothing personal, its not helpful to give a squat who Mr Townsend is to rate this technology.

edit: less assuming