In the hi-fi world, solid-state electronics is in retreat. Valves (vacuum tubes) are displacing transistors and integrated circuits. More curious still, strange new passive components are being recommended — silver, titanium or carbon wires and cables, gold foil capacitors, ultra-linear potentiometers, and so on. Suspiciously, all these components are vastly expensive. But, says Daedalus, they may have some basis in physics. One claim is that ordinary copper cable has rectifying tendencies, as exploited in the old copper oxide rectifier. Indeed, any soldered joint or impure metal may rectify, or generate thermoelectric voltages, or fail to obey Ohm's law. Test instruments may not be able to detect these tiny imperfections, but the ears of dedicated enthusiasts can.
So Daedalus is abandoning the solid state. He recalls that the nineteenth century standard of resistance was a column of liquid mercury. Being isotropic, it had no rectifying properties. In the 1960s, a sodium cable sheathed in polythene was tested for power transmission. Overloading it melted the sodium in its sheath, when the rise in resistance limited the current.
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