From Mundorf to Nigekasu 040: A Rare Japanese Solder with Platinum, Gold and Germanium 🇯🇵

Hey everyone,

In this article I’m going to tell you my story with the solders I use on every cable I make.
The topic might not matter to a lot of people, but it matters a lot to me that anyone thinking of ordering from me knows everything about my work before dealing with me.

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Contents

The start

Ever since I started making cables, I’ve been really careful about the products I use.
I don’t just order and pick blindly, as they say. I research, compare, buy and test, and only then do I commit.
Some people might think I’m overdoing it and making it bigger than it is,
but that’s the only way I’m comfortable: sure, convinced and tested before I commit to something that’s going to reach the customer buying from me.

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I started with this one.

A Chinese solder with excellent ratings, and it’s fine as a starting point.

After working with it for a while, I started looking for the best options out there,
and I went with: Oyaide SS-47
after it was recommended to me by Norne Audio, the well-known cable maker.

I bought a full 100 gram roll.
This one has 4.7% silver and comes from a very reliable source, I mean the factory.
A lot of people recommended it, Norne included.

I used it for a while and committed to it, but I didn’t stop searching, because if you want your work to get better, you have to raise its quality.

After a long search I got to Mundorf MSolder. The company is German and needs no introduction in audio.
I bought 10 meters of it.
It’s about the same mix with less silver, 3.8%, but with gold dust added.

I liked it more than the Oyaide, even though it was slightly cheaper.

Then I found out Mundorf has a higher tier:
Mundorf MSolder SUPREME SilverGold. It’s known worldwide and has:
9.5% silver
0.1% gold
1.8% copper

And it was the biggest step up in all my work.
Over time I noticed myself the difference solder makes to a cable’s performance, and honestly, only people who’ve tried it will feel it.
I’ve been using it for almost a year now on my expensive cables,
because it’s costly: 100 grams delivered to Saudi Arabia cost me around 200$.
I bought it in quantity, because most of my sales are high-end cables, and I also use it as my main solder in all my testing.

But this is where the question started that never left me: is there anything above this?

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The search

I started searching, and it took me almost 6 months looking for something better.

I compared the best-known audio solders from Germany, the US and Japan, and I had 3 conditions I wouldn’t compromise on:
1. Genuinely a higher tier, not just a marketing name.
2. Tried and known among audio enthusiasts.
3. From a reliable source, dealing with the maker directly with no middlemen.

In the end I found a really rare Japanese solder:
Platinum Gold Nigekasu 040
The problem was that everything I found at first was old stock,
in the packaging of the Japanese company that first developed it, K.O. Sound Lab.

Every solder has a shelf life, some go up to 5 years,
and sadly all of this was old stock, some of it from 2009, so if you bought it you’d run into problems.

I tried contacting K.O. Sound Lab and found out the company had closed and its email no longer works.

I didn’t stop.
I went back to the actual maker of the solder, the Japanese company Nihon Superior, who developed the SN100C alloy.
Very professionally, they introduced me to the Japanese company that inherited the exclusive worldwide sales rights for the solder (SRG Markt), and let them know about me before I wrote to them.

After that came a long email exchange:
– I confirmed the current solder contains platinum, gold and germanium.
– I received the official Safety Data Sheet (SDS) from the maker.
– I ordered a custom spool in the length and weight I need.

The official sheet

This is the first page of the official SDS I got from Nihon Superior, with the product name PtAuNiGeCuS(040)F3 on it.
The first image is the original sheet in Japanese, and the second is an English translation, just to make it easier.

What’s the difference from Mundorf?

What Oyaide says, the Japanese store whose SS-47 I used:
The Oyaide store, one of the best-known audio stores in Japan,
rated 12 solders it sells on 4 criteria: bass, highs, precision and how hard it is to work with.

By the store’s rating, Platinum Gold Nigekasu 040 got the highest total for sound (14 out of 15), and it was the only one with five stars for bass.

Link to the Oyaide page
https://oyaideshop.blogspot.com/2018/06/

The rating is the store’s own opinion, and they gave it a higher score than the solder they make themselves!!!
That’s when I got more confident it really would be different from everything I’d tried before.

The hardest to work with

And that’s exactly what I want.
In the same rating, it got five stars for difficulty, the only one of the 12 to get that.
The reason is that its flux is light and halogen free, so it doesn’t forgive mistakes:
the ends have to be clean, the heat has to be right, and the prep has to be precise. Any rushing shows in how the joint looks and how good it is.
For me that’s not a flaw, quite the opposite. A solder that needs an experienced hand is what separates a professionally made cable from one made in a hurry.
It also needs a specific type of flux to work with, especially with rhodium plugs,
and I bought it from them even though it’s expensive: 100 grams = 100$, which is a really, really high price for flux, but I took it on so I can be as sure as possible that my work is sound.

The spool is ready 📦

I got photos of my spool, and it says, word for word:
• NIHON SUPERIOR
• PtAuNiGeCuS: platinum, gold, nickel, germanium, copper, tin
• TYPE 040
• HALOGEN FREE

The price

The spool I bought is 150 grams, and the wire itself is 1.2 mm thick.
Purchase: 1460 riyals
Shipping: ¥3,150 = about 80 riyals
Tax and customs will be: 292 riyals
Total:
1832 riyals (= $489)

Honestly, the price is really, really high,
but for a product I’m sure of, its quality, its specs and its source, I’m going to take the risk and buy it.
And if it passes testing and I commit to it,
I’ll be the only store in the world offering it to its customers. I wouldn’t say that if I wasn’t 100% sure.

Every joint gets measured, not just looked at 🔬

Great solder isn’t enough on its own. A joint can look fine to the eye and still have a problem:
strands cut during stripping, a cold joint, or Litz wire whose coating didn’t fully burn off.

That’s why every cable in my high-end line will go through a measurement check
using the 4-wire (Kelvin) method, which reads resistance down to 0.01 milliohm:
– I measure every conductor from the plug end to the headphone pin.
– I make sure the channels match and that no conductor reads higher than the rest.
– If any number is outside the normal range, the cable doesn’t ship until I find the cause and fix it.

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What this means for IEM World customers

This solder will be exclusive to the high-end cable line at IEM World.
I won’t mix it with any other solder, not even for tinning the ends,
so every joint in the cable is the same alloy, from start to finish.

What’s next? 🎧

The real test starts when the spool arrives:
testing, comparisons, listening on more than one headphone, and measuring every joint.
That takes time, so I won’t set a date. Once I have a clear picture, I’ll share it with you, either in a full article or in a quick post with my honest opinion.

Best regards,
IEM World

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