When it comes to audio reproduction, most of you are probably familiar with power and interconnect cables made from copper, silver, or even gold wires, and know that each of these conductive materials has its own tonal signature.
I imagine that most of you have not yet had the opportunity to learn about tinned copper cables, unless you have a hobby that involves restoring or hot-rodding vintage audio equipment, which tends to be full of tinned copper interconnect cables. The same goes for vintage electric guitars and guitar amplifiers, which also use tinned copper wire in their construction.
It is unlikely that the choice to use tinned copper wire for vintage electronics was related to the sound quality of the wire as we consider it today, but more likely to its industrial qualities of corrosion resistance and easy stripping during the manufacturing process (as we saw in the previous article: Why tinned copper wire?).
Now, if copper, silver, and gold wires have a characteristic tonal balance when used for internal component wiring, speaker cables, interconnect cables, and so on, then it stands to reason that tinned copper wire also has its own characteristic tonal balance.
It wasn’t vintage audio engineers who first realized that the musical tone of tinned copper conductors had something special about it, but vintage electric guitar engineers, who referred to the tinned copper wire used in vintage electric guitars and guitar amplifiers as “vintage tone” wire.
Guitarists called it “vintage” for the obvious reason that it was found in vintage electric guitars and their amplifiers, and they added “tone” to the description because they wanted to indicate that vintage tinned copper wire had superb tonal properties that contributed to the superiority of the tone of those vintage electric guitars and their amplifiers over modern production equipment.
This is how the term “vintage tone” wire came about, and it is precisely from the guitar community that the term derives.
Following the discovery of the superb musical qualities of “vintage tone” tinned copper wire compared to the copper wire used in contemporary electric guitars and their amplifiers, an entire industry has sprung up around modifying modern electric guitars and amplifiers in an attempt to recapture the “vintage tone” of those fantastically musical vintage electric guitars and their amplifiers, such as Eric Clapton’s Fender Stratocaster “Blackie,” for example (above).
…the article continues in part 2
