Antoine's system

[Antoine]

I know Audiophonics, they're like a candy store for tinkering audiophiles! But they're French and Devialet is French so I boycot them! No of course not, just kidding! I think their prices in general are very OK but not always, depends a bit on the article category. Shipping costs are of course higher than buying from local shops.

Initially I thought I'd buy 100% silver hookup wire from Neotech which is also sold at Audiophonics (Neotech has solid copper hookup wire as well) but in the end I didn't go ahead with that because of the high costs and uncertainty of how much I needed at that time. Perhaps I'll revisit that subject later now I know the exact lengths I need. For now I went for low cost Jantzen silver plated copper wire as I wrote. Did not use the Jantzen 1.0mm2 cable yet (as a DC power cable), I may never.

I bought the Jantzen cables from a local Dutch shop (Rumoh), the two Neutriks are from Bax Music and the Oyaide plug is from EBay (Spain, but free shipping).

What did you get?

There was an interesting thread in the uptone lps-1 section on CA where uptone basically said (paraphrasing) "in DC terms it's all about gauge so they use copper ones - custom made in china -, and fancy silver wire doesn't really make any difference - but go ahead and have exotic cables if you think it does".

I was never sure whether it was worth investing in silver wire from the SR3 (I did but I've got nothing to compare it to). I would have thought silver connectors would be better than anything else though, just for better contact?

Looking forward to hearing how the lps-1 sounds to you. I was on the verge of buying one to compare, but if AIR keeps working for me I think I'll get off the merry-go-round and go back to the one box system it was all about in the first place  

Just in theory I fully agree with Uptone there. Silver has a higher conductivity than copper (about 6%) which means that for DC it has lower resistance. Of course thicker, higher gauge wires also means lower resistance. 

The only reason I considered pure silver was because of people consistently reporting that Hynes's silver cables gave better results in SQ. I never tried silver myself in this application so don't know what differences to expect in practice.

Pure silver is too soft to make connectors of, same goes for pure copper so we often see copper alloys (tellurium copper being a low resistance/impedance one) or silver platings. I don't think the silver plating really helps much in a DC application except maybe for a lower contact resistance like you mentioned. For music or high frequency signals (e.g. digital) this could surely help too because of the skin effect. Then again I've surely heard differences in character between different metal platings of AC connectors so it may matter here with DC because of other (to me unknown reasons) too.

I chose the 16AWG gauge because it was (according to the Neutrik specs) the maximum size accepted in the XLR plugs. In any case this a perfectly safe thickness in my application. It's capable of conducting more than enough current before significantly heating up/showing too much of a voltage drop.

Like Octaviars said Uptone uses a equal gauge for the LPS-1 (indeed coaxial). For their JS-2 linear PSU they use 18AWG Belden 9418 star quad cabling and Oyaide DC plugs. By pairing the conductors of these cables they have an effective 14.7AWG. I just copied Paul Hynes's design: twisted (actually he braids his cables) and unshielded with silver plated XLR's. The Hynes DC7 annealed copper, silver plated lead I have is about the same thickness solid core cable as the the one I made extra myself. Mine is stranded, silver plated OFC copper so should have a slightly higher silver content.

Regarding the LPS-1 I bought, I know it's probably overkill but I'm going to use it to power the SSD and FMC. I may experiment with powering the Paul Pang switch with it too. But I'm afraid you may have thought I was going to use it to power the SMS-200 and compare it to the SR7. I haven't planned such a test but may do so at a later time, don't wait for it though!

Another reason for buying the LPS-1 is that I may use it in the future to power a device like the ISO Regen, if I want one, or perhaps an ethernet isolation/reclocking device not yet released to the market but something at least Uptone is working on. Of course it could also be used for something entirely unknown to me at this moment.