Im not worried about my cables coming apart, nor do I subcribe to sales pitches trying so sell you a lot in the desert. I merely felt this a worthy topic of discussion. And to boot Van den hul uses carbon I believe for this very reason.
Where I was using the word particle I meant and should have been usinig the word "Crystal" as my friend corrected me. Im also saying I have not heard this degradation myself, yet. Here is an excerpt by a respectable leader in the industry. For further reading, http://www.vandenhul.nl/artpap/hybrid.htm
PS the metal he refers to below is copper and silver as further reading reveals.
By: A.J. van den Hul CD
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First a short discussion on metal conductors and their vulnerabilities:
Due to the current cable manufacturing processes based on economics and aging, all metal conductors are sensitive to growing chemical boundaries at the edges of their internal crystals.
These chemical boundaries form non-linear conductive barriers for the electrical signal to be transferred.
The main reason for the origination of these chemical boundaries is the rough industrial handling of the basic material during the manufacturing of the single leads by pulling the metal through many dies and the unprotected storage in between. Especially the bare storage of the drawn wires on reels in the open air creates another problem: chemical interaction with airborne reactive components and their subsequent deeper propagation into the metal during the next processing steps.
As you can imagine, the result is that the final conductor still looks like a conductor, but on microscale does not exactly behave like one anymore.
