Certainly silver has always had a place in the wire and cable industry. It's long been a fixture in military and high temperature applications. In the case of Teflon wire, you have always seen silver as either the sole metal present or at least as the plating. The silver is necessary to counteract the corrosive process for coating Teflon to the wire.
But I'd like to draw your attention to the extremely slim difference between silver and copper. Silver is only a scant 8% more conductive in bulk terms than copper! In terms of differences in signal loss, then, this renders silver's conductivity superiority almost irrelevant, especially when considering the way silver is actually used by the hucksters (or should I say misused) of some popular cables.
For example, in the late 1990's an illusive Silver Salesman latched on to this precious metal as a marketing opportunity to sell a web branded performance vapor cable to audio and video enthusiasts. I'll call them the Silver Saboteur. I'm tickled to see how the marketing folks at Silver Saboteur have privately labeled and disguised an otherwise normal, good miniature video cable, produced as a commodity by a major US producer, simply by substituting an infinitesimally small silver center conductor. This re-branded PVC cable is then dressed for the part and is sold to consumers at a 1500% mark-up.
It's outrageous how little silver there is in the Silver Saboteur. In fact its bulk resistance is HIGHER than the LOWEST performing coaxial cable in our River Cable product line. And it shows MORE signal loss and impedance non-uniformity than almost any pure copper cable made for the same application by any manufacturer. But it does have SILVER in it. Sure silver is a great conductor, but in the case of the Silver Saboteur there is so precious little of the precious stuff that its only true purpose is marketing bait for the gullible consumer. It's amazing and sad!
