All the latest news and events from the Chord Company straight to your inbox!
“…harmonics still come through bell clear. What is most noticeable is that the bass is more level with the rest of the tones…
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is a well made cable. That goes without saying. Everything about it, the look, the feel, all scream quality.
I also have no doubt that it will last a long time on the road…”
[ read the full review here ]
Chord Cream instrument cable
Review excerpt & images courtesy of theaudiobeat.com
“… how often can you say that the most interesting product you heard at the show was a cable, or even a range of cables? The “it all sounds the same” cable nay-sayers out there are going to hate this, but then they wouldn’t bother to listen anyway — because they know that cables can’t make a difference. Except that The Chord Company, longtime suppliers of sensibly priced cables to the audiophile masses, were demonstrating that actually they do.” [Read the full report here]
Roy Gregory – The Audio Beat
The Signature ARAY power cable is our latest mains power connector. Its design has been influenced by the research that led to the newest version of our flagship power cable, the Chord Sarum Super ARAY. Not only is the cable a completely new design, so are the plugs. The UK mains plug has been custom made for us and features heavily silver-plated pins and a special cover that allows us to apply mechanical damping to the plug.
Power cables are a difficult subject and perhaps mains plugs even more so. The fact is though, that every element within a power cable will have some influence on the performance of the equipment it’s used with. Back in 2005 when we produced our first power cable, the Chord Power Chord, we learned that every aspect of the termination mattered. The way the internal conductors were routed, the type and the direction of the fuse and strangest of all, the degree of torque applied to the screw that secures the cover of the plug to the main body. All of this knowledge was put into the development of the Chord mains plug – the fuse chosen on the basis of listening tests, the silicone damping spacers experimented with in the demo room and the silver-plating chosen after listening to gold-plated, rhodium-plated and silver-plated prototypes. The same is true for the new IEC plug. This features sliver-plated contacts, produced from a heavier gauge of material.
In truth, power cables are like interconnects. Pay attention to every aspect of the design and build, and all the things that on their own make small but significant improvements add up and allow us to produce something really special.
The combination of new plugs and a new ARAY conductor configuration means that the Signature ARAY power cable has more than a taste of the performance improvements that the Sarum power cable is capable of. There is that same sense of noise you’re not aware of until it’s not there, disappearing and revealing a new layer of detail and dynamics.
Signature ARAY power cable is available as:
UK mains plug to IEC (new Chord mains plug and new Chord IEC)
UK mains plug to 16 amp IEC (new Chord mains plug and Furutech 16 amp IEC)
Euro mains plug to IEC (Furutech Euro plug to new Chord IEC)
Euro mains plug to 16 amp IEC (Furutech Euro plug to Furutech 16 amp IEC)
The Signature ARAY power cable is available in 1m 1.5m and 2m lengths. Custom lengths and terminations are available to order.
Sounds good to me… [photo of Alan and Nigel courtesy of EAR]
Signature ARAY Power Cable
That meant that we had to revisit the Sarum Tuned ARAY power cable, looking at exactly how we employed the Tuned ARAY conductors and a lot of experimentation, but at the end of that process, the Super ARAY was born.
I don’t doubt that mains cables are anything other than a crucial part of any hi-fi system, but never in my many years in the industry have I heard such a profound improvement from a power cable. It has to be said that our demo room system is hardly poorly wired. At the time it was sitting with a full Sarum Tuned ARAY loom in place and frankly it was pretty fabulous. Good enough to make concentrating on the more mundane aspects of my job slightly difficult – the temptation being to slip off into the demo room and check a few tracks out.
Sarum Super ARAY power cable
Connecting the new version of the Sarum power cable to the source component, a layer of noise I never knew was there just disappeared. Quite extraordinary. So we put another one into the DAC and the same thing happened again. We put another one into the pre-amp and the same thing happened again. Finally, we made one for the power amp – and yes, pretty much the same effect. There’s a thing with power cables – generally the first one you put in seems the most impressive. With the new Sarum (not yet named Super ARAY) power cable though, every one we used resulted in the same sort of step forward. That lack of noise really has to be experienced.
There’s that classic musician’s quote – “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the space you leave between them that matters”. I had never heard that space so clearly, which I guess is saying I’ve never heard nothing sound so much like nothing. I’m trying hard to avoid the term “inky blackness”, but the sense of silence was quite profound. More important though, was just how much that silence added to the music we were listening to. The space between notes really is important if a piece of music is going to work as it’s intended to – and it wasn’t just the space, it was the way that lack of noise let you hear so much further into the way musicians were playing. There was a particular Kate Bush track from the album “Aerial” where the piano notes are allowed to die, allowed to decay completely before another note is struck. It’s a sound I know. Back when I began work at The Chord Company, I visited all the musicians I knew so I could hear them play and I remember one night sitting next to a beautiful piano while its owner struck notes and let them fade into silence. There are some really beautiful timbres and harmonics as a piano note dies away completely and here they were on our demo system.
Just in case you are thinking 192 high resolution, that’s not what we were playing – we were listening to CDs at the time. It’s a strange thing. I spent years waiting for higher sample rate recordings to come along and just as they did, we discover how profoundly musical CD quality music can sound. What a revelation!
So the first Super ARAY cable we made was the Sarum power cable and as the cable design was finalised, our MD, Alan Gibb, started a conversation with a possible new mains plug supplier. We took one of their existing designs, modified various elements and ended up with the best UK mains plug we’d heard. This, along with a modified IEC plug from the same company is what you’ll find at each end of a Sarum Super ARAY power cable.
Sarum Super ARAY DIN
The development Sarum Super ARAY power cable showed that we needed to think very hard about the construction of our Tuned ARAY interconnects. That was an interesting place to start as we understood with Sarum Tuned ARAY we’d certainly produced our most musically transparent cable (and maybe one of the most musically transparent interconnects we’d heard). One of our customers described it most beautifully as “the cable that does everything and nothing at the same time“.
From our point of view, it lets you hear just how good your components are and, in turn, how good the music you listen to really is. For us, this had been a revelation. Music I’d been listening to for most of my life took such a big step forward. Things I thought I knew intimately revealed details and subtleties that I simply hadn’t come across before. Even more though, it was the way these details and subtleties added to the sense of involvement and immersion in pretty much everything I listened to. It was akin to hearing the music rather than the hi-fi and even with badly recorded and overly compressed discs, somehow what came through was the music rather than the bad recording. It would be wrong to say that you were unaware that the disc was compressed or badly done, but it was a lot easier to just enjoy the music.
How to transfer what we’d done with the power cable to the interconnects turned out to be more challenging than at first we thought but when we finally got it right: WOW! Everything we’ve said and our customers have said about Sarum Tuned ARAY, that level of coherence and that sense of music that it brings to decent systems – that’s still there – but like the power cables there is a genuinely surprising amount of extra musical information on every disc we’ve listened to. What has really surprised us, and for that matter everyone who has heard the Sarum Super ARAY cables, is just how much more musical information there is – and we haven’t touched on high resolution music yet!
What musical information means ultimately is detail but it’s the way that detail is presented. It’s the coherence, the sense of a natural musical flow that makes it so special. All the detail in the world doesn’t count for much if it’s not presented coherently and it’s the coherence that makes it so right and so musically compelling. There was something else that happened around the same time. We had some sample RCA plug surrounds machined from PTFE (existing Sarum cables use a rather beautiful acrylic plug surround, which in truth we have always been happy with). The PTFE RCA plug surround though made pretty much global improvements to every aspect of performance and important enough improvements to mean that in future, we’ll be using the PTFE plug surround in place of the acrylic.
It was the same experience with the digital cables. The new Super ARAY configuration brings another whole layer of detail and music. Perhaps one of the most profound experiences during this development process was working on the Sarum streaming cable. It was the understanding and experience that we’d gained that allowed us to re-design and re-work the Sarum streaming cable. The result is remarkable. Apart from the Super ARAY conductor configuration we’ve also fitted a new Ethernet plug. A higher specification version of the one we had been using. Like the other Super ARAY cables, it’s the way that you end up with a sound that ticks every box. Undeniably, the musical experience is just a lot better and, from a high fidelity point of view, the extra detail, sense of dynamics and overall resolution are equally impressive. This means that we have a new range of Sarum cables: Sarum Super ARAY. Even better, anyone with an existing Sarum interconnect can return their cables via their retailer or distributor and have them upgraded to Super ARAY specification.
Nigel Finn
RCA to RCA (with new PTFE plug surrounds)
XLR to XLR (any existing XLR Sarum cables sent back for upgrade will be fitted with the our latest custom XLR plug)
DIN to DIN
DIN to XLR
If you can’t see the termination you need, then please contact us and we’ll see if we can help.
RCA to RCA (fitted with the new Chord PTFE plug surround)
RCA to BNC
BNC to RCA
BNC to BNC
AES/EBU (fitted with the latest version of our custom XLR plug)
Streaming cable (fitted with new black, high speed Ethernet plug)
We expect to launch a Super ARAY USB cable as soon as the design is finalised.
UK mains to IEC
UK mains to 16 amp IEC (the 16 amp plug will be the Furutech version that we currently use)
Euro mains to IEC (Sarum Super ARAY Euro power cable will continue to use the current Furutech mains plug. The IEC will be our new silver-plated IEC plug)
Euro mains to 16 amp IEC (Sarum Super ARAY power cable will continue to use the current Furutech mains plug. The 16 amp IEC will be the Furutech version that we currently use)
Right now we can supply and upgrade all Sarum interconnects and power cables with the exception of any cable requiring RCA terminations. Sarum Super ARAY RCA cables will be available from the start of April 2015.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. These cookies have a lifetime duration of 7 days.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Google analytics cookies have an initial lifetime duration of 2 years.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!