Cryogenic treatment of guitars warning

[Mike Sulzer]

To explain the process of DCT in more detail we talked to Neil Plumb, a specialist in the DCT process:

“Much of the work of audio components is to pass on information, either in the form of electrical signal, or to transmit vibration physically to the atmosphere creating sound waves. Making certain that stress from the manufacturing process is removed allows even the highest quality materials to perform at a level they otherwise won’t achieve."

True believing is a wonderful thing, but it almost always turns out to be nonsenses. This time? Who knows? But the probability looks low.

...with all this buzz how can it NOT work?

Yep, with all this buzz about dinosaurs and people walking together in an earth that is just 6000 years old it just has to be true. Right.

[tedmich]

To explain the process of DCT in more detail we talked to Neil Plumb, a specialist in the DCT process:

“Hi-Fi is an area of real interest to me, and one whose largely non ferrous components lead the more conventional engineering application of Cryogenics in new directions. Much of the work of audio components is to pass on information, either in the form of electrical signal, or to transmit vibration physically to the atmosphere creating sound waves. Making certain that stress from the manufacturing process is removed allows even the highest quality materials to perform at a level they otherwise won’t achieve.

Tests we carry out with our customers in audio suggest we have positive effects on a material’s ability to transmit music post Cryo. Applications include audio valves in which internal elements are destressed, appear to conduct more power, and show dramatically reduced microphonic tendencies.

Cables in copper and silver show increased ability to conduct music and an extended service life through resistance to work hardening; this translates into on and off stage equipment which sounds better and lasts longer, but also allows the Hi-Fi enthusiast to achieve performance which had been previously unattainable.

We’ve also treated complete amplifiers, and CD players, achieving excellent results. The copper tracks and solder joints within operate more consistently and efficiently allowing the equipment to output a more accurate impression of its source material.

Longstanding work with Phil Taylor at the Dave Gilmour owned ‘Astoria studio’ led to us treating most of their studio cabling and much of their rack mount recording equipment. Dave Gilmour now has all his on stage cables and even some of his guitar strings treated by us and has had an entirely positive on stage and recording experience in pursuit of audio excellence. Other musicians using our Cryo include Brian May of Queen, Green Day and ‘The Edge’ of U2. Our process is supplied to the ‘We will rock you’ stage shows around the world, and we’ve enjoyed excellent reviews of our treated audio valves in both ‘Guitar buyer’ and ‘Guitarist’ magazines.“
from:
http://www.russandrews.com/popindex....DCT_treatment?

http://www.frozensolid.co.uk/audio_s...kcmcisjkkm8is1

CUSTOMERS
At Frozen Solid we pride ourselves on providing a quality service that is second to none in the industry. Over the course of many years we have developed and refined our proprietary treatment recipes for audio components.

There are a few companies around the world that offer cryogenic treatments service for audio components but we feel we have the edge over them when it comes to DCT. In fact there are DCT companies that even promote and market their services by trying to pass off our achievements as their own! But don’t take our word for it, see what our customers and magazines have written about Frozen Solid’s achievements:


“I quickly realised that Deep Cryogenic Treatment [DCT] was an essential ingredient of high quality cable design that I was not prepared to ignore”

Graham Nalty, Designer of the multiple award winning Black Rhodium Cables

The article that started the changed the shape of hi-fi and cables forever...


“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”
“The cryogenic process has enhanced the cable’s qualities by increasing solidity of stereo – making voices and instruments more real and in the room – and also increasing the richness of tone and detail”
“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.”

Keith Howard, Hi-Fi News, July 2001 reviewing Frozen Solid’s DCT process on Max Townshend’s; Townshend Isolda cable



“The tonal differences are clearly discernable, and after all four sets have been given a thorough work out, the results take everybody by surprise...”
“In a word WOW! To freeze or not to freeze? It makes a difference for sure in terms of dynamics and response”
“... the difference between the Cryo vs. Non-Cryo Retros is like the difference between night and day”
“Definitely not a gimmick, nor are they over-priced; worth a look”

Guitar Buyer April 2006 - Reviewing Watford Valves cryo treated by Frozen Solid
Watford Valves, one of Europe's leading suppliers of tested, graded and guaranteed valves to the professional music industry.



“Although the mechanisms and reasons are still not well understood and evidence is largely anecdotal, its use in audio components (consumer and professional) does seem to be growing steadily, thanks to the efforts and facilities of companies like Frozen Solid.... After extensive listening and engineering reliability tests, Tannoy is now applying it to the new Definition series crossover networks and internal cables.”

Editors Award - Hi-fi Choice Magazine September 2009



“Gregory you have definitely convinced me that cryo treatment brings audible improvement to audio cables”

Fabrizio Biagetti, Rome Italy



“It’s been a week now since I got back from Frozen Solid my Kimber PBJ interconnects that they DC Treated and I said I’ll share in this forum my candid opinion about it. First reaction when I tried that was that I was unimpressed. I WAS STUNNED. I preformed two sets of simple tests to possibly tell if there’d really be any significant difference before and after DCT:
A) Test the DC treated PBJs against an untreated one and B) Test it against better cables, in this case against VDH D 102 Mklll and a First Ultimate cable.
The best measurement of course would still be to test it with a similar cable. But in the absence of this, comparing it with a better cable and getting almost the same performance IMO is a reliable enough basis for concluding there is indeed an improvement. I think the point here is not necessarily to transform a good sounding cable to a very expensive sounding one, but rather has to do something wuth maximizing the performance. With all the other factors involved in making cables, i.e. quality of insulation, termination, etc that’s simply impossible. And I do hope nobody would think that now I’m salespitching for Frozen Solid.

Mr Ears, Hi-Fi Choice Forum Member
The DCT process had a noticeably beneficial effect on all the test CDs
Hi-Fi World May 2011

with all this buzz how can it NOT work?

[Rick Turner]

When I first got into the whole cold cruel world of cryo treating, the folks I was working with had a pretty simple explanation of what the process does...one that even a non-metallurgist could grasp. They said that the treatment enabled the carbon atoms to find their proper place within the lattice of iron atoms, and so there would be far less in the way of clumps of carbon here and there within the matrix. And if you think back on much of what has come up in this discussion, that explanation makes a lot of sense. Whatever alloy formula we want should be as homogenous as possible with every atom in it's theoretically best position. That's going to minimize grain size and evenly disperse the characteristics imparted by the various added materials.

[salvarsan]

Lest there be any remaining doubt as to the efficacy of magnetic Barkhausen noise testing, SAE defines standard ARP4462 for it's use in defect detection.

[salvarsan]

Interesting paper, but there is no mention of cryogenic treatment in your reference (that I could find). Are you simply inferring the previously described decrease in grain size due to cryogenic treatments might impact the magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN) levels measured in this paper? This is not a trivial extension of the logic, I'd avoid making such jumps unless the original authors included this inference in their analysis, and thus subjected it to peer review. Realize too that there are a growing number of "scientific publications" with no traditional peer review, not saying this journal is one but they are increasingly common, complicating extending results even more. Caveat emptor.

It is a given by now that the primary effect of cryo treatment on steel is to render finer grain size. Until that paper spelled it out, it was not adequately established (in my mind) that MBN levels in steel correlated well with grain size.

With calibration, MBN grain estimation is more accurate than ultrasound ... for a given alloy. That particular caveat is because MBN decreases with grain size in annealed nickel. These caveats are well-known enough that entire non-destructive testing businesses are founded on them. Indeed, anyone who heat treats automotive and heavy machinery parts has a small test suite.

What aren't adequately documented are conductivity and permeability changes. In electrical conductors, thermal and electrical conductivity track each other. You might expect minor heat conductivity changes in copper and silver after cryo treatment, but all papers I've read comment on thermal without electrical mention. The permeability increase in soft ferromagnetics (with implicit coercivity decrease) would be nice to see mentioned, too.

[tedmich]

Interesting paper, but there is no mention of cryogenic treatment in your reference (that I could find). Are you simply inferring the previously described decrease in grain size due to cryogenic treatments might impact the magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN) levels measured in this paper? This is not a trivial extension of the logic, I'd avoid making such jumps unless the original authors included this inference in their analysis, and thus subjected it to peer review. Realize too that there are a growing number of "scientific publications" with no traditional peer review, not saying this journal is one but they are increasingly common, complicating extending results even more. Caveat emptor.

[salvarsan]

Barkhausen Noise

If the scientific acticles are credible, magnetic Barkhausen noise (MBN) levels are specific to the grain size in the ferromagnetic substance.

In steels, smaller grains mean less propensity to MBN and broader applied field range over which the noise distributes. Smaller grains correlate with higher permeability and lower coercivity, properties conferred by cryogenic treatment.

Comparison of Magnetic Barkhausen Noise and Sound Velocity Measurements for Characterisation of Steel Microstructures

[Rick Turner]

I heard Zephyrs at Duncan a while back, and I have a set of three for a long term project making a repro of a guitar that I cobbled together from a '61 or '61 SG Les Paul Custom back in 1967 when I was playing in a band in New York. Jerry Garcia got the guitar from me in 1971 and used it for a while...it's on that GD Live album from '71.

Anyway, the Zephyrs sounded really good to me, and I agree with Frank's assessment of them being very "detailed". I should pull them out and measure them.

[salvarsan]

Using FEMM 4.2, I modeled the static field for a 1010 steel slug vs. the 430/Ni slug, A5 block on the bottom, and did a |B| plot @3/16" above the slug's top.
There was no difference between the two.

Whatever is going on, it isn't described by the at-rest magnetic model.

[David Schwab]

My conjecture is likely way off but, if you trust Frank Falbo's veracity, something is going on there that makes an audible difference.

Any ideas?

But I have to say that when those sound files were posted that time of the different bobbin materials with the Zephyr, I sure couldn't hear any difference. And I have good ears for tones.

Different pole piece material sounds different, that we know. So I can appreciate the bimetal construction. But has anyone heard them before and after cryo?

[salvarsan]

I do not understand; it appears that they want a high permeability in the interior of the core, but I do not see the purpose of this. When the pole pieces are open and especially short, permeability above say ten makes very little difference. (You see this from the view of magnetic reluctance: the reluctance around the complete path can only be made so low if most of the path is compose of high reluctance material, air. Also from measurement, no matter how high you make the permeabiliity, the inductance does not rise much above a factor of three wrt air.)

My conjecture is likely way off but, if you trust Frank Falbo's veracity, something is going on there that makes an audible difference.

Any ideas?

[Mike Sulzer]

Very interesting! So then you can see the inductance drop as you increase the strength of the magnet, and if you get back to the air core value you have reached complete saturation.

This is based on both full Zexcoil pickups and (mostly) measurements in individual isolated coils. Permeability (measured as inductance of the coil-pole piece pair) of the nickel-iron alloys is a very strong function of field strength in the range encountered in pickups, as is pure nickel.

[Mike Sulzer]

I do not understand; it appears that they want a high permeability in the interior of the core, but I do not see the purpose of this. When the pole pieces are open and especially short, permeability above say ten makes very little difference. (You see this from the view of magnetic reluctance: the reluctance around the complete path can only be made so low if most of the path is compose of high reluctance material, air. Also from measurement, no matter how high you make the permeabiliity, the inductance does not rise much above a factor of three wrt air.)

This is also why the Zephyr pole pieces are a hybrid of middling permeability, non-saturating 430 solenoid steel wrapped around a high perm/saturable nickel core. Together, they cover the magnetic requirements for a wide dynamic range output ... but that's obvious only in retrospect. Finding it was pure brilliance.

[ScottA]

Is that based on actual measurements with pickup geometry, or just on what is observed in a situation involving a closed magnetic circuit? These are very different situations. A short open pole piece does not saturate nearly as easily as in a situation where the material "completes the circuit", connecting the positive and negative poles together. I do not think it is possible to saturate any steel in a pickup. I do not know about materials such a permalloy, etc., but I would not assume that it saturates with an Alcico magnet without some measurement.

This is based on both full Zexcoil pickups and (mostly) measurements in individual isolated coils. Permeability (measured as inductance of the coil-pole piece pair) of the nickel-iron alloys is a very strong function of field strength in the range encountered in pickups, as is pure nickel.

[salvarsan]

Saturation is an issue with these types of materials in a pickup situation, but that's a really expensive way around it.

It certainly is.
Expense may not have been the primary concern on a silver wire pickup, but I don't see those exotic pole pieces moving to other Seymour Duncan designs.