Lifetime for speaker cables? Any maintenance for speaker cables?

Should outlast you as long as you don't bash them about too much.

Snips the ends off if they start to oxidize. Otherwise nothing else to go wrong.

Yup will be fine. Only thing when they get old and exposed to the air, the copper/silver wire can tarnish, which aparently might be a degradtion of the contact.

A quick dip in a bath of warm water, salt and vinegar (as in table salt and Sarsons, not crisps) (yes, honestly - it creates hydrochloric acid - NaCl + CH3COOH --> NaCH3COO + HCl ) will remove any tarnish.  Rinse thoroughly in fresh (tap) water afterwards and remember to run the tap when disposing of the water/salt/vinegar mix, especially if you have a stainless steel or aluminium sink....

Cable itself should be fine. If they are terminated with banana plugs check the connection (tightness / soldered?) and if necessary clean the plugs with a reputable cleaning product..

hammill wrote:

Benedict_Arnold wrote:

jjbomber wrote:

Snips the ends off if they start to oxidize. Otherwise nothing else to go wrong.

 

 

A quick dip in a bath of warm water, salt and vinegar (as in table salt and Sarsons, not crisps) (yes, honestly - it creates hydrochloric acid - NaCl + CH3COOH --> NaCH3COO + HCl ) will remove any tarnish.  Rinse thoroughly in fresh (tap) water afterwards and remember to run the tap when disposing of the water/salt/vinegar mix, especially if you have a stainless steel or aluminium sink....

Excellent. A real man should always be able to make his own acid. How many readers are tempted to stop what they are doing and go and make some straight away?

It was a tip I got building radio-controlled planes a few years ago, preparing stuff for silver-soldering.

Just don't ask what a university classmate from Belfast told me he could do with a bag of fertiliser, and  [the rest of this post has been redacted on the grounds that some stupid idiot might actually try it]....

Oh we've all done that. Powdered aluminium and diesel etc.  Who hasn't blown up the odd chemistry classroom or three when a lad? Ah, what larks.

Teller-Ulam multi-stage nukes are the hard ones. Dry rooms for the Lithium-6 Deuteride are expensive and you try getting hold of a robotic facility to machine the hollow Plutonium spark plugs. (The council goes bananas when highly radioactive swarf is left in their recycling bins so you can't do it at home!)

I don't think I can bear the tension much longer!  Surely somebody is going to post that they wear out (because the electrons in them get tired or some similar hocus pocus). 

Chris

It's actually called hydrogen embrittlement, and as well as being a problem familiar to all welders, is a real phenomenon in (over-)cathodically protected underwater structures, I'll have you know.  BP had to pull two effin' great subsea manifolds from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, in water about a MILE DEEP, because of this back in 2003 or 2004.

As for copper (lifted straight from Wiki so it must be true)...

Copper alloys which contain oxygen can be embrittled if exposed to hot hydrogen. The hydrogen diffuses through the copper and reacts with inclusions of Cu2O, forming H2O (water), which then forms pressurized bubbles at the grain boundaries. This process can cause the grains to literally be forced away from each other, and is known as steam embrittlement (because steam is produced, not because exposure to steam causes the problem).

QED running your hifi at 11 out of 10 on the dial in a sauna might not be a good idea.

SO THERE (insert mooning smiley here)

I'm wearing out due to a surfeit of free-radicals!