OK, so we agree so far.
Now, suppose the question to be answered is, "Can Audiophile Cletus hear the difference between copper and silver wire that he claims he can?" Now, putting aside the issue of positive controls, that's an easy experiment (conceptually) to run- Cletus says he hears in on his Diana Krall LPs in his home system, "...clear as day. You'd have to be deaf to miss it!" We swap copper and silver randomly and see if he can identify or sort or however you structure a DBT.
Funnily enough, I did just that!
To see if I could tell the difference between Silver and any other metal. So I purchased pure silver wire from Jeweller's supply, and made headphone cables with it. And then another cable, but this time I used individual wires from a CAT5 cable, the cheapest wire I had at my disposal. I also had some good quality cable that came with a pair of Focal headphones, plus a £20 Amazon cable.
This is what I found:
- The pure silver cable (terminated) was on a par with the Focal cable, in terms of capacitance, inductance and resistance.
- The Amazon cable was crap! it shared the ground cable up to the Y split.
- The CAT5 cable had the highest terminated resistance because it doesn't solder very well.
- The silver cable and the Focal cable sounded superior to the rest.
- The CAT5 cable was a close second.
I ended up using the silver one, after all. Not because of its magical sound quality, but for the fact that fully annealed pure silver wire, is the softest metal I could find, that soldered well, and was cheap enough.
Just fun facts.