3 ms·

I don't know what the audiophiles are talking about, silver is a better conductor than gold, but I know the reason for gold plating on audio connectors has noth

I don't know what the audiophiles are talking about, silver is a better conductor than gold, but I know the reason for gold plating on audio connectors has nothing to do with audiophilia, it is because gold does not corrode. What this has to do with sound is skew to the reason it is used, as technically, over a long period of time, the gold plated connectors will definitely sound a lot better than the corroded whatevermetal ones.

dtx1 5y ago
> don't know what the audiophiles are talking about They don't know either. Audiophiles are by and large the dumbest consumers on the planet, willing to pay for huge sums of money to grifters and lying companies for imaginary gains that are either not measurable or well below the threshold any human could conceivably hear a difference. And they are so deep in that trap that they get angry when they are called out on their bullshit (see MQA for example).
vmception 5y ago
I just like walking into Best Buy to see how the floor staff is going to lie to me Someone should make a YouTube channel with this kind of content, adding laugh tracks to every way they try to close to sale
jimbob45 5y ago
Thanks for enlightening me. I had no idea and I’ve seen those gold-plated cables for decades now.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
I thought the ductility if gold helped make a better connection. More touching surface area.
- kadoban 5y ago
  That seems unlikely to me. Ductility is important for deforming the material into wires or sheets. If your connectors are pushing hard enough on each other to permanently deform the materials, something is seriously wrong.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> over a long period of time, the gold plated connectors will definitely sound a lot better than the corroded whatevermetal ones. This makes me curious about aluminum, chromium, and stainless steel (which as far as I know is just steel with a lot of chromium in it). I know that technically aluminum corrodes instantly and then maintains a stable corroded state. Will it work as a conductor that way? I have no idea whether chromium is like aluminum, corroding and becoming stable, or if it resists corroding to begin with.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  Yep, the most common grades of stainless steel you're likely to encounter are chromium and nickel alloys of carbon steel, with the common marine / surgical grade 316 stainless containing between two and three percent molybdenum for added corrosion resistance. And yep, they're corrosion resistant because the chromium instantly forms an oxide layer that protects the underlying metal. Stainless steels are expensive partly because they're difficult to work with, generally having poorer machinability than regular carbon steels, and tend to work harden more rapidly too.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    Sure, stainless steel resists corrosion, but it is a pretty bad electrical conductor, especially compared Cu, Au, or Ag. (I'm not disagreeing with you, this is for the benefit of GP.)
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      What about aluminum? I looked up a table of electrical resistivity: resistivity $/kg Cu 1.7e-8 10.3 Au 2.4e-8 63600 Ag 1.6e-8 827 Fe 1.0e-7 ? (cheap) Al 2.8e-8 3.23 But I don't know how important any of these numbers are. The table suggests that iron is about 6 times more resistive than copper or silver and 4 times more resistive than gold. Gold itself looks about 50% worse than copper while being more than six thousand times as expensive, so for gold to be used, resistance to corrosion must be important. Silver is the best metal listed in the table, and slightly better than copper, so I assume the cost difference explains why we have lots and lots of copper wiring and not so much silver wiring. Aluminum is a bit (17%) worse than gold for resistivity, but aluminum is cheap. Why use gold? I can imagine a few reasons: - This table gives values at 20 centigrade, but things change at a more relevant temperature. - There's some kind of important threshold around 2.5e-8 ohm-meters, so that gold is on the right side of usability and aluminum just misses it. - Aluminum's corrosion resistance is different in nature from gold's, and the difference matters. Are any of those true?
marcan_42 5y ago
Gold plated connectors are absolutely normal and completely standard and essential. The vast majority of durable data/signal connectors used today are gold-plated. Hack open any random decent microUSB connector if you don't believe me. You need a solid connection for signal integrity. Corrosion messes that up. Of course, with modern cost optimization, usually only the contact surface is gold plated these days, not the entire pin, and the plating is quite thin and cheap. Connectors intended for higher connect/disconnect cycles will be more expensive in part because they need a thicker gold plating to avoid wearing out. Gold plated PCBs are also completely standard (google ENIG). In this case the plating is even thinner and just serves to ensure solderability and avoid corrosion. It's so thin that it immediately dissolves in the solder during the solder reflow process; it's just there to allow that process to happen properly, and to avoid corrosion in non-soldered areas. Almost every modern high tech PCB Gold containing solder, on the other hand, is nonsense.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > Gold containing solder, on the other hand, is nonsense. Well, actually™, it turns out gold-tin alloys (which is what this probably is) get used a lot for solder, particularly in optoelectronic and microelectronic device packaging. You may already know this, but I didn't until tonight, when I thought, "Hey, is this really a thing?" and looked it up. :) (I can't see anything that suggests it helps with "clearer sound," of course. I also searched for "audio-grade solder" out of curiosity and it seems there are some companies that market solder that way, but they seem to generally be (a) silver alloy, not gold, and (b) regarded rather skeptically.)
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    I actually didn't know about that one. Sounds like it's mostly for specialty applications though (e.g. ceramic packages). Looks like it's something like 80% gold, so that would get expensive really fast if you attempted to use it like regular solder :)
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> I know the reason for gold plating on audio connectors has nothing to do with audiophilia, it is because gold does not corrode. Yep. Occasionally I read comments to the effect of "sure, gold is technically going to resist corrosion much better, but that's never going to be an issue in practice," to which I can only think: you didn't grow up in Florida without central air conditioning. :) I admit that it's a pet peeve of mine that "gold audio cables" have become an anti-audiophile meme. There are absolutely a lot of, ah, dubious cables out there, but to my knowledge none of them are using gold for the wire. There are only audio cables with gold-plated connectors, and it's not like they're $300+ specialty items; they're cheap and common.

dtx1 5y ago

> don't know what the audiophiles are talking about They don't know either. Audiophiles are by and large the dumbest consumers on the planet, willing to pay for huge sums of money to grifters and lying companies for imaginary gains that are either not measurable or well below the threshold any human could conceivably hear a difference. And they are so deep in that trap that they get angry when they are called out on their bullshit (see MQA for example).

vmception 5y ago

I just like walking into Best Buy to see how the floor staff is going to lie to me Someone should make a YouTube channel with this kind of content, adding laugh tracks to every way they try to close to sale

jimbob45 5y ago

Thanks for enlightening me. I had no idea and I’ve seen those gold-plated cables for decades now.

cjbgkagh 5y ago

I thought the ductility if gold helped make a better connection. More touching surface area.

kadoban 5y ago
That seems unlikely to me. Ductility is important for deforming the material into wires or sheets. If your connectors are pushing hard enough on each other to permanently deform the materials, something is seriously wrong.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> over a long period of time, the gold plated connectors will definitely sound a lot better than the corroded whatevermetal ones. This makes me curious about aluminum, chromium, and stainless steel (which as far as I know is just steel with a lot of chromium in it). I know that technically aluminum corrodes instantly and then maintains a stable corroded state. Will it work as a conductor that way? I have no idea whether chromium is like aluminum, corroding and becoming stable, or if it resists corroding to begin with.

TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
Yep, the most common grades of stainless steel you're likely to encounter are chromium and nickel alloys of carbon steel, with the common marine / surgical grade 316 stainless containing between two and three percent molybdenum for added corrosion resistance. And yep, they're corrosion resistant because the chromium instantly forms an oxide layer that protects the underlying metal. Stainless steels are expensive partly because they're difficult to work with, generally having poorer machinability than regular carbon steels, and tend to work harden more rapidly too.
- Maursault 5y ago
  Sure, stainless steel resists corrosion, but it is a pretty bad electrical conductor, especially compared Cu, Au, or Ag. (I'm not disagreeing with you, this is for the benefit of GP.)
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    What about aluminum? I looked up a table of electrical resistivity: resistivity $/kg Cu 1.7e-8 10.3 Au 2.4e-8 63600 Ag 1.6e-8 827 Fe 1.0e-7 ? (cheap) Al 2.8e-8 3.23 But I don't know how important any of these numbers are. The table suggests that iron is about 6 times more resistive than copper or silver and 4 times more resistive than gold. Gold itself looks about 50% worse than copper while being more than six thousand times as expensive, so for gold to be used, resistance to corrosion must be important. Silver is the best metal listed in the table, and slightly better than copper, so I assume the cost difference explains why we have lots and lots of copper wiring and not so much silver wiring. Aluminum is a bit (17%) worse than gold for resistivity, but aluminum is cheap. Why use gold? I can imagine a few reasons: - This table gives values at 20 centigrade, but things change at a more relevant temperature. - There's some kind of important threshold around 2.5e-8 ohm-meters, so that gold is on the right side of usability and aluminum just misses it. - Aluminum's corrosion resistance is different in nature from gold's, and the difference matters. Are any of those true?

marcan_42 5y ago

Gold plated connectors are absolutely normal and completely standard and essential. The vast majority of durable data/signal connectors used today are gold-plated. Hack open any random decent microUSB connector if you don't believe me. You need a solid connection for signal integrity. Corrosion messes that up. Of course, with modern cost optimization, usually only the contact surface is gold plated these days, not the entire pin, and the plating is quite thin and cheap. Connectors intended for higher connect/disconnect cycles will be more expensive in part because they need a thicker gold plating to avoid wearing out. Gold plated PCBs are also completely standard (google ENIG). In this case the plating is even thinner and just serves to ensure solderability and avoid corrosion. It's so thin that it immediately dissolves in the solder during the solder reflow process; it's just there to allow that process to happen properly, and to avoid corrosion in non-soldered areas. Almost every modern high tech PCB Gold containing solder, on the other hand, is nonsense.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> Gold containing solder, on the other hand, is nonsense. Well, actually™, it turns out gold-tin alloys (which is what this probably is) get used a lot for solder, particularly in optoelectronic and microelectronic device packaging. You may already know this, but I didn't until tonight, when I thought, "Hey, is this really a thing?" and looked it up. :) (I can't see anything that suggests it helps with "clearer sound," of course. I also searched for "audio-grade solder" out of curiosity and it seems there are some companies that market solder that way, but they seem to generally be (a) silver alloy, not gold, and (b) regarded rather skeptically.)
- marcan_42 5y ago
  I actually didn't know about that one. Sounds like it's mostly for specialty applications though (e.g. ceramic packages). Looks like it's something like 80% gold, so that would get expensive really fast if you attempted to use it like regular solder :)

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

> I know the reason for gold plating on audio connectors has nothing to do with audiophilia, it is because gold does not corrode. Yep. Occasionally I read comments to the effect of "sure, gold is technically going to resist corrosion much better, but that's never going to be an issue in practice," to which I can only think: you didn't grow up in Florida without central air conditioning. :) I admit that it's a pet peeve of mine that "gold audio cables" have become an anti-audiophile meme. There are absolutely a lot of, ah, dubious cables out there, but to my knowledge none of them are using gold for the wire. There are only audio cables with gold-plated connectors, and it's not like they're $300+ specialty items; they're cheap and common.