About the wire thing - I’m living in that rabbit maze and it’s fascinating, complex and difficult. ll post more as I find time. A brief response to the ’solid or litz’ remark is YES. There are so many interacting variables of geometry, conductor purity, and insulation dielectrics that can go wrong in so many ways. George Cardas famously said (something to the effect of) ’solid conductors stay out of trouble easier’.
Fifty years ago (Thiel beginnings!), little credence was given to wire as a performance element. We gained access to (at that time) obscure and esoteric considerations about wire via our cousin Ted Lyon who was a senior physicist on the Jupiter Space Probe project. Ted introduced us to wire considerations and solutions which resulted (among other things) in our adoption of ultra pure, long crystal, polished solid conductors in teflon. That solution persisted through Jim’s career. It can be improved upon, but with peril and expense. I’ve presently been massaging those considerations and variables for a long time.
As time has passed, the term ’litz’ has faded from use due to foggy definitions. Originally it meant each individual conductor separately varnished (insulated), but came to apply to sub-bundles being varnished, which doesn’t address the inter-strand conduction problems. (That phenomenon is itself controversial.) That sense of no strands or conductors touching any others is the sense that Jim meant by 'solid or litz' being best. In today’s jargon, those individually litzed conductors would be called ’solid wire’, even if their gauge were smaller than a human hair.
Besides Thiel’s 18 gauge solid, and many others’ fine-gauge (individually insulated) solids, the foil category fits the isolation requirements. Jim used Goertz foil speaker wire in his later years. The thinness of foil conductors solves the skin effect problems of round wire as well as meets the individually insulated requirements for non-signal migration. But its inherently high capacitance makes it inappropriate for use with some amplifiers, and likely to perform differently among many amplifier choices. So I am avoiding that avenue.
I’ll come back with more comments and reports about my work over these last months. It’s quite a trip.
