Seymour's new cryo-silver pickup

[Xaar]

Calling me a "barking dog" or as Rick called me "an asshole ", yes, in full letters, there is no need to prove WHO insulted and who didn't.

I merely pointed out irrelevant properties that were backed up with false claims.

"Silver has a jumpier sound". Define jumpier please.

Actively, or should I say by all means, defending the promotion of a company's product is also irrelevant from a simple forum member on this site.

Also, SD's BIASED tests (blindtests must be performed by independant labs) pertain to compare two wires of the SAME gauge, one in copper , one in silver!!!
That's not an honest comparison, knowing that silver is slightly more conductive (5-7% IACS depending on purity) but behaves in a relatively similar manner, a DIFFERENT gauge of silver wire should have been used, thus THINNER, using the SAME insulator ( PTFE ) for the bigger gauge copper wire.
To be totally honest.

the end result will be a very very similar design, so using a slightly thinner wire could help overwinding a bit for example.

ONLY then could it be said that silver wire is leagues better than copper wire for audio application in magnetic sensors.
Oh but wait, there's plenty of literature in handbooks already pertaining to designs with different types of conductors, and silver is ALWAYS said to behave very closely to copper in audio range.
Only honest A/B blindtests could prove the to the public that the differences for EQUIVALENT (and not "same") gauges are indescernable for the human ear.

It's not my job to give out formulas or multiple refs. I already gave a more than valid ref pertaining to different conductor gauges and their comparison in blind tests.
The correlation to magnetic wire is partially valid too, since we're speaking of capacitance, losses and bandwidth.

I am NOT the one who boasts extravagant and unscientific claims "live sound" jumpy" and so on. Cryo treatment has almso been qualified in such outrageous terms "liven up the tone, widen this and that"....
Those who started claiming these properties shold first show me THEIR blindtests, oscillo graphs and independant lab reviews.

I'll grow a white beard before I see any of them.

Silver is cool, but far TOO similar to electrical grade pure copper in audio designs (excluding issues pertaining to corrosion of course)
It's niow only a matter of costs and wild claims to promote a given product.

And please cease to call people who don't buy unverified claims "ignorants" or "trolls". And cease gutter level insulting such as "asshole" and "barking dog"

Modesty isn't floating in the air around here.

[salvarsan]

Calling me a "barking dog" or as Rick called me "an asshole ", yes, in full letters, there is no need to prove WHO insulted and who didn't.

I made a general statement but
you took it for a personal rebuke.

Whether you bay at the moon or demonstrate excessive sphinctritude no longer matters.

For anyone else watching, here again is the link to the Edit Ignore List.

[Xaar]

I made a general statement but
you took it for a personal rebuke.

Whether you bay at the moon or demonstrate excessive sphinctritude no longer matters.

For anyone else watching, here again is the link to the Edit Ignore List.

I admit it would be extremely intriguing if you did care for excessive sphinctritude.

But you must admit you cry whan an employee at SD cries, and laugh when they laugh. You've demonstrated at least that on the forums.
Support whatever company you desire to support, along with all their promotion speeches, but leave to others the SAME liberty to express their equal support or distrust of the same company...unless liberty of speech and thought is nothing more than a puny detail.

Being honest is called "sphinctritude" according to you.


Be it so and have a good day!

[belwar]

Silver has a jumpier sound". Define jumpier please.

Actively, or should I say by all means, defending the promotion of a company's product is also irrelevant from a simple forum member on this site.

Also, SD's BIASED tests (blindtests must be performed by independant labs) pertain to compare two wires of the SAME gauge, one in copper , one in silver!!!
That's not an honest comparison, knowing that silver is slightly more conductive (5-7% IACS depending on purity) but behaves in a relatively similar manner, a DIFFERENT gauge of silver wire should have been used, thus THINNER, using the SAME insulator ( PTFE ) for the bigger gauge copper wire.
To be totally honest.

the end result will be a very very similar design, so using a slightly thinner wire could help overwinding a bit for example.

ONLY then could it be said that silver wire is leagues better than copper wire for audio application in magnetic sensors.
Oh but wait, there's plenty of literature in handbooks already pertaining to designs with different types of conductors, and silver is ALWAYS said to behave very closely to copper in audio range.
Only honest A/B blindtests could prove the to the public that the differences for EQUIVALENT (and not "same") gauges are indescernable for the human ear.

It's not my job to give out formulas or multiple refs. I already gave a more than valid ref pertaining to different conductor gauges and their comparison in blind tests.
The correlation to magnetic wire is partially valid too, since we're speaking of capacitance, losses and bandwidth.

I am NOT the one who boasts extravagant and unscientific claims "live sound" jumpy" and so on. Cryo treatment has almso been qualified in such outrageous terms "liven up the tone, widen this and that"....
Those who started claiming these properties shold first show me THEIR blindtests, oscillo graphs and independant lab reviews.I'll grow a white beard before I see any of them

First off, scientific verification of tonal claims is not a requisite applied to any pickup or guitar maker. Pickup making is an unregulated industry and requires no proof of a claim primarily because so much of it is subjective. Anyone can say what they want - and people quite regularly do. Most people will tell you that despite all the science in the world, there is not yet a valid theory as to why something sounds the way it does. Tone, like wine, is often decribed in bizzare terms designed to elicit a specific image - i.e. This wine has road tar undertones with a strong raspberry vine finish (No one knows what the fuck that means, but it works and sells wine).

Second off, as a personal friend of friend of Franks (outside of his professional life), I will honestly tell you that I trust his ears more than just about anyone. One of his natural abilities is putting words to the stuble nuances that people hear but regularly cannot describe. Several times i've heard a difference between instruments, but could not put my finger on what exactly was happening.. He was very helpful in describing what I was hearing so that I could focus in on the reasons. I trust his keen ears. If he says it's jumpy - then its jumpy.

Thirdly - If everyone were to describe pickups as "This product sounds good", it would be boring as cheese to read magazine ads. All of us have to be .. umm.. creative when decribing tone.

[Xaar]

Nothing quite like an anonymous troll with a nasty agenda...

Odysseus replied to Polyphemus the ugly Cyclops : "My name is NOBODY" .

Tell me who is considered a "troll" for the generations to come? the one eyed oaf or Ulysses?

[Mike Sulzer]

First off, scientific verification of tonal claims is not a requisite applied to any pickup or guitar maker. Pickup making is an unregulated industry and requires no proof of a claim primarily because so much of it is subjective. Anyone can say what they want - and people quite regularly do. Most people will tell you that despite all the science in the world, there is not yet a valid theory as to why something sounds the way it does. Tone, like wine, is often decribed in bizzare terms designed to elicit a specific image - i.e. This wine has road tar undertones with a strong raspberry vine finish (No one knows what the fuck that means, but it works and sells wine).

Describing a sound, be it in flowery terms or not, is one thing. That is fine, I agree with you completely. But there is more going on here than that: when you say what it is that makes it sound that way, you can expect to be called on the validity of your reasoning.

In response to several others of you:
X is a troll? Really? Sure he is obnoxious, but he also knows what he is talking about, within the limitations of his experience (kind of like lots of others). I do not consider him any more obnoxious than a couple regular members of this forum.

[belwar]

Describing a sound, be it in flowery terms or not, is one thing. That is fine, I agree with you completely. But there is more going on here than that: when you say what it is that makes it sound that way, you can expect to be called on the validity of your reasoning.

Valid point

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

belwar... sounds like you're describing a very robust Syrah. But, enough of that.

The verboseness of our trade (and other trades, such as vinting) can genuinely help. Yes, it creates barriers, yes it creates arrogance, but there is a semiotic basis to argue that we need it to know how to listen. Where is Mark Hammer? He's good at this stuff. If you have a customer that only thinks in terms of "bright" and "warm", he'll never listen to the envelope, he won't listen to overtones, he won't listen to compression... because he hasn't started using words for it. If you introduce a new vocabulary then people will genuinely start listening differently. If there are folks who like wine here, I dare you to try reading the tasting notes on the bottle (or at the store if it is a good store) and see if you can detect them as you drink the wine. Do this a few times, and you'll never drink wine the same way again. It is the same with anything musical - I love talking gear with people who have been playing a while because I can always learn how to listen a bit differently by listening to them describe things to me.

Xaar, your idea for a test is asinine. You're assuming that superior conductivity and thus making it the equivalent of a larger gauge copper wire is the only benefit to the wire. You've developed a scientific test designed to give you the results you're looking for. It is like you work for the hack psychology department at a school I used to work at.

[Xaar]

Now onto CRYOGENIC TREATMENT:

there's a marketing strategy that I call the "Flex syndrome" which consists in extrapolating about hypothetical unproven properties of a protein powder with handfuls of graphs (graphs with no units and no inital conditions of experiment sometimes...says it all) , not to mention the abundant "refs" which are often recently-discredited papers that date back to the 80's or even lab reports that emanate from...private labs which work FOR the nutritional supplement company.

This phenomenon is occuring a bit everywhere in the audiophile world. Claims with no refs or invalid refs, quirky graphs, bold assumptions etc.

The best way to prove it is to pût back to back the most enthusiastic cryo treatment believers:

For years I have tried to find whatever proof pertaining to improvement of magnet wire conductivity and "sonic enhancement" of the latter through cryo treatment (which is bringing back the treated material back to room temperature in a controlled manner, normally used on steels to eliminate a certain amount of austenite phase) in CRC, Elsevier , Wiley and Springer publications altogether ...but zilch.

It is amusing though to see that some websites just list bold assumptions that CONTRADICT themselves from one site to the other , for example :
on Cryogenic Treatment Services
we have

If you take the cables and circuit boards down to -195°C, near absolute zero temperature, where the strength of the atomic bonds starts to diminish, the materials will revert to their natural crystalline structure. By using the cryogenic stress relieving process, it is possible to significantly reduce the stresses that cause reduced quality of sound. This will work for all conductor materials although the better the IACS rating the better the sound improvement. It is believed that when higher quality conductor cables are cryogenically treated the process moves from simply reducing stresses to a far greater manipulation of the crystal boundaries that are interfering with the electron flow

though on VH Audio - Cryogenic Treatment
it is said:

In our experience, the degree of difference vs non-cryoed parts is not the "earth shattering" or "night/day" difference that some companies' sales literature might suggest, but rather an incremental improvement more akin to an upgraded connector, cable or other "tweak". Also, in our experience, not all materials benefit from cryogenic treatment to the same degree. Brass seems to benefit more from cryogenic treatment than pure copper, and high purity silver may actually be DEGRADED by cryogenic treatment, based on our listening tests.

what is "night and day" is the wild guesses type of claims that contradict one another.
Both site try to mix up in the consumer's head two different concepts that have nothing to do: mechanical improvement and electrical conduction improvement.


For example, in the book "Cryogenic Engineering : 50 years of progress (Springer 2007)" , the only properties of silver magnet wire that are discussed are those when silver is MAINTAINED at cryogenic temperature , in the shape of a tube comprising a powder , and it pertains SOLELY to superconducting.
There isn't ONE word about sonic enhancement or improving the conductivity, thus the suumptions made by the company "Cryogenic Treatment Services" concerning oxygen atoms present in the crystal lattice of "cryo treated" silver wire comes simply from the rich and fertile audiophile imagination, ideas stolen from books that concern SUPERCONDUCTING, not service at room temperature of magnetic sensor solenoids .

Some materials maintain more or less with little loss their mechanical and/or electrical properties when placed in sub-zero temperatures, it can be checked in any cryogenics related book.

SOme other materials change radically at liquid nitrogen temperature, but what interests us in terms of magnet wire is WHAT DOES IT RETAIN FROM BEING FROZEN ONCE BROUGHT BACK TO ROOM TEMPERATURE?
The result is concerning conductors such as copper and silver: nothing worth mentioning, crystalline phase comes back to normal , end of story. No "chemical purification" , no special phase appears neither, or else it wold be documented.
The superconducting research would be the FIRST ONES to notice any ything worth mentioning if it was the case, since they deal with high purity silver at these extreme temperatures (xhther it's liquid nitrogen or liquid helium) all the time


My conclusion is, that this makes me think of what is going on in the gemstone & rock trade : new age "crystal healers" claim that the scientific community refuses to accept the "radical" changes that occur when exposing natural rock crystals to "moonlight" or in contact with the "human magnetic field"...that crystals can "charge" or "disharge" energy.
I say that those who launched this crystal hype just overread very briefly some books pertaining to capacitors, basic quantum mechanics , piezoelectricity, and whatever else, taking the elements here and there that could help build their belief system.

[frankfalbo]

Okay, so explain to us why a pickup sounds noticably different after cryo treatment to any and all who listened.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Okay, so explain to us why a pickup sounds noticably different after cryo treatment to any and all who listened.

Because you weren't listening to his line graphs. Duh.

[Xaar]

belwar... sounds like you're describing a very robust Syrah. But, enough of that.

Xaar, your idea for a test is asinine. You're assuming that superior conductivity and thus making it the equivalent of a larger gauge copper wire is the only benefit to the wire. You've developed a scientific test designed to give you the results you're looking for. It is like you work for the hack psychology department at a school I used to work at.

What is genuinely asinine is to systematically refuse a A/B test with theoretically quasi-equivalent (and I said quasi, not truly equivalent) models .

From an engineering point of view, if you can have similar conclusions after numerous listening blindtests performed on a wide panel of subjects with a design that is very close and will require minor modifications and a total cost that will be consequently smaller, the decision is quickly made.

what you're telling me is in fact the following: "let's leave everything as it is, anyways equivalent models are impossible to make, especially not in copper."

On the other hand, yes, I suppose EXACTLY what you implied in your post with one difference though: if a comparison should be made, the copper wire should be covered in teflon too, or else we'll have a frequency response that will have more to do with the properties of the different insulators than those of the different conductors, silver in a given gauge and copper in a slightly thicker corresponding gauge.
Same bobbin material, slugs , magnet etc. of course too.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Because you've left out the chance to discover differences that could occur for reasons other than increased conductivity. You've made a decision about what it will sound like, and you're obsessing over that. I have nothing wrong with tests, but they should be open to results that aren't what you want them to be. That is just bad science. It is like archaeologists measuring skulls in the 19th century to prove the superiority of the white race among humans. They collected data in such a way to show whites being "superior" (surprise, surprise), and that was "science" talking. Science based on bad experiments when the scientists already made up their minds on what they wanted to find!

If you value the scientific method so much, why haven't you TRIED a silver wire pickup? Why haven't you TRIED cryogenically freezing a pickup? I'm not going to say it works, but I'm not going to say it DOESN'T work until I try it. All sorts of things happen in pickups that are beyond our comprehension. Why does a pickup take a few hours to sound right after changing a magnet? Beats me, but it does that. Many people have attested to that.

"what you're telling me is in fact the following: "let's leave everything as it is, anyways equivalent models are impossible to make, especially not in copper.""

Wow, talk about putting words in other people's mouths! I have no idea what you're trying to say (or what you're trying to say that I was trying to say) so I'll just leave it at that.

You're no Odysseus, dude. You're more Dwight from The Office.

[Xaar]

Okay, so explain to us why a pickup sounds noticably different after cryo treatment to any and all who listened.

Who is "any and all" ? You and your audiophile friends?

You can't compare a zephyr with a run out of the mill SD pickup.

Take two IDENTICAL pickups and freeze ONE , leaving the other alone.
Oh excuse, me, I'd rather ask an independant lab, because you'll tell me of course that the result is fantastic.

I have listened for hours to abusively high priced audiophile material with very often no improvement at all (comparing to decent mid-priced material of course, not crappy third party poorly made and designed components)

Should I believe too the millions of people who'd SWEAR that homeopathy really helped them?
Placebo in medecine is equivalent to suggestibility in the audiophile world.

People are "inclined" to favor what is presented to them as "space age" treated. That is why blindfolded honest independant tests are required. Not a test made by a panel of employees or a chief designer working for the company, nor biased demos performed by funded or endorsed professional players who'll just state what they're suppose to say as stipulated in the contract.

I promised D.Schwab after your numerous complaints about me "criticizing your work and calling you liar" that I wouldn't respond anymore to you.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Dude, whatever meds you stopped taking a couple days ago, I think you should really consider getting that prescription refilled.

You keep ranting about an obscure section of the audiophile world and assuming that we're all somehow in on it like a big conspiracy.

Never mind the independent lab.... have you done ANY experiments? You can't make a conclusion that it does nothing and remain obstinent until proven otherwise. Seymour & crew are developing a product, not presenting a case before the Supreme Court. If you don't want one you don't have to buy one.

Get a life.