[Audio Empire]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2011 03:55:56 -0700, Ed Seedhouse wrote
(in article ):

On Jul 18, 5:56=A0pm, Audio Empire wrote:

There are exceptions to every rule, and even the cheapest interconnects w=
ill
work forever if you never touch them - just hook 'em up once and forget '=
em.

That was not true of Radio Shack speaker wire I purchased in the
1970's. It sounded fine, but eventually decayed and rusted to the
point where they would go intermittent and eventually just stop. The
sound quality was, so far as I could tell, identical right up to the
point they failed. I don't know the cause, but when a wire stops
conducting electricity you don't need a double blind test to know it!

The radio shack speaker cable was standard copper AFAICS, Copper doesn't
rust, but it does corrode (the bare ends eventually get a blue-green coating
of crud on them especially in very humid environments.) You can cut the
corroded ends off and re-strip enough to reconnect, but what you really need
to do is to use a good terminations that form gas-tight connections, then the
part of the cable that connects the signal won't corrode.

After awhile they reformulated something and the wires worked fine as
long as I had them, but for awhile there were indeed problems. I
doubt if you could buy anything that would do this kind of things
these days.

Copper is copper.