Riddle me this: how is carbon a conductor?

Carbon is more of a resistor than a conductor. That's why older resistors were made out of Carbon. That in itself should tell you about how conductive it is in comparison to Copper or Silver. Since resistance equates to thermal losses and thermal losses equate to signal losses, one would have to be silly to use Carbon as a conductor within the confines of what was supposed to be a low loss / high resolution audio system.

If one doubts this, take a look at this chart that compares the levels of electrical conductivity between various elements. Whereas Silver is at 62.9, Copper is at 60.7, Gold is at 48.8 and even "lowly" Aluminum is at 37.7, Carbon is down at 0.07 !!! In effect, even Rhodium, which is a poorer conductor than Aluminum is at a conductivity level of 23 and is used on many different "high end" RCA's, spades and power plugs, is still 328 times more conductive than Carbon!!! Comparing Carbon to Copper ( 867 times more conductive ) or Silver ( 898 times more conductive ) is ridiculous to say the least.

As such, if one is worried about having clean RCA & speaker connections while they are using a Carbon based conductor in their system, they are wasting their time. You could literally coat your connectors with a hair thin layer of mud and they would still be more conductive than carbon. In effect, using carbon as a signal carrying device would be no different than dissipating / wasting signal in a resistor that wasn't necessary to the stability of the circuit. Kind of like spending money on something that you didn't need or wasn't beneficial i.e. a big waste with very little redeeming properties.

Herman: Are you actually reading what that article says and understanding it or are you taking it at face value? A child with basic electronics knowledge could tear that article apart piece by piece.

Since the link that you provided primarily discusses AC, i'll stick to that. Suffice it to say that showing some type of a picture-graph of a 480 millivolt square wave at 6 MHz has very little to do with how well a given product / conductor will perform at 60 Hz and / or near the audible range passing a Sine wave.

As far as i knew, people were using filters / power line conditioners / regenerators to try and narrow the bandwidth of the AC path. According to that article, it apears that we should be trying to achieve a wider bandwidth that would act as a more linear conduit for RFI to enter into our gear. After all, we want a pure sine wave that is very limited in bandwidth and nothing else.


How one could think that anything in that article ( pertaining to AC ) is beneficial is beyond me. With gibberish like this invading this forum, i'm going back on vacation. Sean
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PS... To switch over to signal carrying cables, if you want to insert yet another source of signal loss into your system, why not just use a carbon resistor of the same appr value? You'll dissipate the same amount of signal with no chance of recovery. On top of that, you'll simply be adding to the divergence between input and output impedances between the mating gear. This reduces power transfer, increases ringing, slows transient response, etc... Then again, maybe they are counting on the "lossy" nature of this type of conductor to not only "lose" some of the primary signal, but also damp / absorb some of the reflections. I guess that we will never know as the people writing their ad text are not technically competent and / or they don't display any pertinent info to the subjects being discussed on their website.