What feels like a long time ago now, we did something we had never done before and played a prototype cable at the Bristol Sound and Vision show. In fact we had a whole raft of new products to play but we included the prototype cable because, in truth, we felt it was one of the biggest steps forward that we had ever heard.

That prototype cable was a very early version of ChordMusic. Since then, we’ve researched, refined and developed the cable to a point where we feel that what we are producing is a truly spectacular new cable.

The changes to the prototype played at Bristol are many and all have added to the overall performance. That first prototype demonstrated just how much the material used to insulate conductors influenced sound quality: it used a unique new insulation material called Taylon®. Up until this point, we’d used what we considered to be the best insulation material we had found, PTFE in all its forms: gas foamed, air-spaced and solid. Taylon® behaves very differently to PTFE and one of its critical differences is that it is phase-stable at typical room temperatures.

In terms of its internal construction, the cable we played at Bristol was below the design specification of the cable we had designed and ordered. The conductor configuration though was identical to the Sarum Super ARAY, so the people at the demonstration were hearing Taylon® and just what a profound effect it had on the performance of the system.

Read the show report from The Audio Beat, which will give you an impression of just how much it genuinely impressed.

Since then and after much experimentation, we’ve stayed with the conductor configuration developed for the Sarum Super ARAY and we have used the same precision machined PTFE plugs as well. From here on though, things have changed – the construction of Tuned and Super ARAY cables use multiple shielded conductors and that means the only option is hand assembly. Precision cutting and stripping machines are used, but the actual termination and conductor configuration can only be done by hand.

Mechanical damping needed consideration.  We use techniques developed for the Sarum Super ARAY, but with the ChordMusic we have gone a step further and applied a constrained layer of mechanical damping to the conductor grouping. It’s a time consuming process but with a cable as transparent and neutral as ChordMusic, the improvements are easy to hear. It brings greater focus and solidity across the frequency range which is particularly noticeable in the higher frequencies. Cymbals sound more natural than we’ve heard before, with a real sense of the complex timbre they produce and how that changes depending on the way the cymbal is hit. We added an external metallic braid to further improve mechanical damping and HF noise isolation before the final braided cover is fitted. The reason for all of this is transparency and neutrality. The Taylon®, combined with Super ARAY technology, means we’re breaking new ground and removing what sounds like the last layer of cloud obscuring the musical landscape. Every one of those additions has made the view still clearer.

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The Sound Of Music

We’ve been building cables for thirty years and in that time learned a lot about the behaviour of different materials – enough to be able to recognise that different combinations of conductor and insulator change tonal characteristics of a cable. Some of the changes are minor, others more significant. We want the colour to come from musical instruments and voices, not from cables!  In fact, there is a whole list of things that we don’t want cables to do.

What our cable designs are about is balance. The balance is carrying as much information as is possible, but without affecting the coherence – at its simplest, the rhythm and timing. Curiously, the less attention you pay to timing and coherence, the easier it is to hear more detail. The problem though is what value can you put on a piece of music without the movement, the rhythm and the feel that the musicians played it with?  Therein lies the passion, the connection and sometimes the magic.

That want for music that communicates has always been at the heart of The Chord Company – it produced firstly, Tuned ARAY and then Super ARAY technologies, both of them unique and both setting new standards in cable performance. They did two things. First of all, they showed that an awful lot of hi-fi components were much better than people realised. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, they showed just how good 44.1 kHz really was. We were truly surprised at just how good CD could sound.

So right now, ChordMusic is connecting our Dem Room system together and it’s connecting my system at home together. How good is it? When something’s right, it’s right.  With music, you know it from the opening notes and never has everything I’ve played sounded so right.  Never before has everything I’ve played sounded quite so real.

Working within the hi-fi industry can be frustrating, challenging, difficult and on occasions – like the other evening, listening to St Dominic’s Preview by Van Morrison – completely wonderful!

Nigel Finn

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No-one would deny that a cable designer’s job isn’t very enjoyable, often frustrating and on occasion rather strange. The past year has seen the advent of the new Sarum Super ARAY and on the horizon is ChordMusic – we are utterly delighted with both.  The thing is, both are almost blue sky projects, inasmuch as we designed and built them with no particular price point in mind.

The new Clearway speaker cable however, is different. We set out with a very deliberate aim to make the best possible speaker cable we could, with a retail price of no more than £10 per metre. We looked at the things we knew worked – so the most obvious first requirement was shielding. Many of our speaker cables use a high frequency effective shielding and its benefits are both accepted and very easy to hear. Clearway replaces our Chord Carnival SilverScreen. This was a speaker cable that used copper conductors, in combination with polyethylene insulation and a dual layer high density foil shield. Like our other speaker cables, the conductors were twisted together and then surrounded with a PVC outer jacket that correctly spaces the shield in relation to the conductors. This is really the recipe for pretty much all our speaker cables.

Carnival SilverScreen managed to pick up rave reviews in every magazine that tested it and it won the What Hi-Fi? Sound & Vision Award for Best Speaker Cable for four years in a row. In those four years though, quite a lot happened and the result of what we’ve learnt is on display in the new Clearway speaker cable. First of all, the multi-stranded conductors are larger. Where Carnival SilverScreen used 15 AWG conductors, the new Clearway uses 14 AWG conductors. The conductors are built of multi stranded oxygen-free copper. That’s the first of the changes. Bigger conductors do seem to really help with control and definition, particularly across the bass frequencies. This is a good cable to use with either floor standing or bookshelf loudspeakers: it will help to control and define.

The next big change is to the insulation material. In place of polyethylene we have used FEP, which is a variation of PTFE and has very similar performance characteristics. The combination of copper and FEP was what we used to produce our Sarsen speaker cable. Because Sarsen was designed to be the thinnest high performance speaker cable we could produce, we used FEP to get the best possible performance from the diminutive 18 AWG conductors. The reasons for this are that, in our experience, the relationship between conductor and insulating material is extremely important. For a long time we have used PTFE with silver- plated conductors. What we found was that the combination of copper and FEP really helped with dynamics and detail, particularly at the frequency extremes. So the conductors within Clearway are insulated with FEP and are twisted together to reduce potential interference. At this point, a specially chosen soft PVC is used to surround and protect the two FEP insulated conductors and provide the correct spacing for the two heavy gauge foil shields.

The outer jacket is another layer of PVC – this time clear – to provide protection for the shielding and a further degree of mechanical damping. The reason for the clear jacket is because of a lesson we learnt from a pair of speakers. This pair of speakers had chrome outriggers to stabilise the speaker and although in isolation the chrome outriggers looked really bright, when the speaker was in the room they reflected the floor and effectively disappeared. Clearway speaker cable looks bright in isolation but once installed is surprisingly discreet.

All this is great but what really sets Clearway speaker cable apart is its performance. Whilst we will never release a product we’re not entirely happy with, there are always products that are particularly pleasing. Clearway speaker cable is one of them. Its performance, its neutrality, its ability to carry dynamics and its tonal characteristics create a performance that you simply wouldn’t expect at this price. It is surprisingly transparent; so much so that like more expensive cables you will hear the burn in process quite clearly. We put the first prototype set in the dem room and a week later I was demonstrating the performance of our mains cable range to a visitor. It wasn’t until we’d listened to Sarum Super ARAY that I realised we’d had the Clearway speaker cable in the system right through the demonstrations and it clearly showed the benefits that each new mains cable brought. All in all, it’s a remarkably transparent cable and one that the entire company is exceedingly pleased with.

Nigel Finn

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