Manufacturer: Supra

Country of origin: Sweden

Models:  Sword speaker cable, Ply Speaker Cable, Dual interconnect

Price: Sword: $1105/3m pr., Ply and Dual wire, $3/ft.

Website: http://www.jenving.se

US Distributor:  www.sjofnhifi.com

BACKSTORY

You hear a lot about system balance.  Getting the right combination of components.  Let's say CDplayer/preamp/amp/speakers.  That's a four variable equation. Then about 35 years ago, Monster comes out with a ‘better cable’ than ubiquitious lamp cord or pro stuff.  And now there are well over 50 manufacturers claiming to make the 'best' cable.  Oy Vey!  Four variables can be headache, and now there's another.  But it's a passive device. A friggin’ piece of wire.  

Leave me alone I say!  I don't want another variable.  I've got enough to worry about already.  Give me a cable that does nothing.  Nothing.  Then I can figure how my active components, those things crammed with hundreds or thousands of parts in addition to runs of wire, are working together.  And besides, most the engineers say cables don't matter anyway.

Further, this cable madness: $3000 for a 1m pair and so on epitomizes all that is wrong with the high-end industry.  Going to an audio store has become intimidating to the point where the shrinking rank and file who seek great home-based replay go to Best Buy or simply don’t bother.  But music should be simple.  Here’s a tip – if you’re spending below $5000 on a system, you truly don’t need to spend more than five bucks a foot on cable regardless of what anyone tries to sell you.  Don’t worry about your cables, work on getting the other stuff right. 

Get Belden from a vendor like Blue Jeans, or something like the Ply speaker cable and Dual interconnect from Supra, excellent cables at about $3/ft. that are more neutral than a lot of stupid expensive stuff.  Figure two sets of 1m interconnects and an 8 foot pair of speakers wires – that’s under a $100 for cabling.  (The included power cables will be more than fine) Skip the wiring as ten percent of the system cost notion or any of that.  If you can’t bear to save the money, you’re much better off putting it into your speakers or amps or room treatment.

Back to those those big, fat Monsters – replacing them with some simple, much thinner stranded cable from Exposure made my Epos ES14s sound snappier.  Got rid of some slur.  Not different, rather clearly better.  Skeptical of my first impression and the notion of wire possibly being destructive, I subjected myself (well, mostly my girlfriend at that time who did the cable swaps) to a blind test.  Listen to a song or passage. Swap cables.  Or not.  I hit on 17 of 20 calls, so obvious was the difference.

Conclusion?  Cables can sound different.  Thanks, genius!  Deeper conclusion -- poorly designed cables can degrade performance.  Thanks again!

But this knocked down one of my cable tenets.  They don’t not matter.

Film mixing studios are packed with cable by Canare and Belden among others.  Pro stuff at pro studios where they’re mixing multimillion dollar films and major artist CDs.  Note the acoustic treatment and high quality monitors.  Expensive microphones.  They’re not going to compromise on wire, let that be the weak link (literally) in the chain.  C’mon. Nor are they looking for anything that colors the sound.  All efforts are made towards accuracy -- what comes out of their monitors is what you will hear in a theater or home in a perfect world. 

I’ve seen miles of stuff like Belden 1800F for balanced interconnects.  In bulk it’s less than a buck per foot.   Granted, with the cable footage studios may have, $100/ft. or even 10/ft. isn’t feasible. And again, most mixers and engineers will tell you that the pro stuff like Belden and Canare is as good as anything.  It does nothing to the signal.

As a value play, cables come up short as well.  Moving from a $200/pair of speakers to a $2000 set will be a huge quality jump.  The same $1800 more for a set of cables yields far, far smaller  gain.

So for years I’ve gotten quite comfortable not caring about cables.  I’ve used Canare and Belden, though over time have acquired some footage of Signal Cable, DH Labs, Nordost (Solar Winds) and Speltz anti-cable.  Reasonably priced stuff.  Evidence primarily of being worn down by marketing material and reviews, common sense experience giving way to audiophile curiousity and insecurity.  Exclusive Solid State Triple Cryo (SSTC_tm) process delivers…, OptimaHelical Double X winding yields unprecedented…, and so on.

Swapping these ‘audiophile’ cables in yielded no immediate epiphanies.  Nothing like replacing my Bryston with a Llano Trinity amp or my old Waveform Solo speakers with VMPS RM40s.  Or putting up room treatment.  The differences would have to be listened for, subtle if they existed at all. 

Though I believe cables can sound different, and not just those that are poorly designed, I’ve come to think of many of them as tone controls.  Voiced by their designers to add warmth, wetness, whatever.  I thought of my cable stable as one that does nothing.   Now anytime I need another set of wire, I call Blue Jeans, Markertek or Signal.  No reason nothing should be expensive.  Or, no reason to pay extra for nothing.  I’d reached security and contentment -- peace -- amidst the madness that is cables.

STORY

So then Lars starts bugging me.  I’d found the Guru QM10 speakers, which he distributes, to be one of the rare, game changing products out there.  Now he wants to know whether I’ve heard the Supra Sword cables he distributes as well.  But as I’ve made clear here and attempted to with Lars, I’m not interested in cables. 

Looking at ratings of countries as to how honestly they conduct business, Sweden is at or near the top.  I’ve worked there and found this to be true.  So when a Swede appears to passionately believe something, particularly when he’s got a good track record, it may be that he’s not trying to simply roll you.  They can be persistent PITAs too.  Cut to:  a box of cables at the front door. The aforementioned Ply speaker cables and Dual interconnects – great values at $3/ft. including shipping.  Also, the star of this review, a 3 meter set of Sword speaker cables, $1105 MSRP. 

Supra cables are made by Jenving in Sweden, which has been in the business for over thirty years.  This is no here this morning, gone tonight cable company.  They make a huge range of cabling, connectors, and power strips. The 52 pages thick catalog of their wares has the heartening slogan ‘NO NONSENSE’ on the cover.

I could describe how the Supras look, light blue jacket, blah, blah, blah, but I really don’t care.  Saw a forum post once where a guy rhapsodized about the look and feel of his $3K cables -- I wanted to york.  If all cables were black, I’d be fine. In fact I’d prefer it as they’d be more likely to disappear in a home theater setup.  The Swords are relatively thick and stiff cables, think half-cooked pasta, but not so much so that they are difficult to work with.  

The only salient ergonomic feature is a bit of typically Swedish cleverness.  The connector, be it a spade lug or banana plug, screws in and out of the end of the cable.  There is also provision for adding a banana to a spade.  In other words, you don’t have to choose terminations, you get both.  This can be very handy should you need to change the way you connect, and helps resale if you go that route.  The ends are crimped to be gas tight – superior to soldering according to Supra.  The cable can only be bought terminated.

As for the construction, I’ll outline a bit without pretending to know whether it makes any difference.  Only thing I’ll say in this regard is that the stated overarching goal of the Supras is to get the timing right, on the notion that everything follows from that.  We philosophically agree.

This from the Supra site:

The method by which the opposite winding is done is ingenious.  Imagine precise, identical winding machines that turn in the same direction.  Now face them at each other, and you can see how they would wind in exactly the opposite direction, creating uniform angles at each cross.  As a strategy for noise cancellation, this construction makes sense. Whether or not zero inductance matters in cables is a subject of debate.  For better or worse, the construction of these cables is more complex and requires more precision than any other in my stable – I can see why they’re more expensive.

SOUND

The Swords ran from my 200wpc Llano hybrid amp to VMPS RM40 speakers.  This run is typically handled by DH Labs T-14 cables at $138/8 ft. pair.  Front end was a Squeezebox feeding lossless files via S/PDIF to a Theta Casablanca III processor with Extreme DACs and an Audio Aero Prima DAC mkII.  Methodology was simple:  listen to a song or passage, swap cables, listen again.  Attempt to minimize reliance on sonic memory as much as possible.  Choosing to avoid derisive laughter, I didn’t ask my wife to do the swapping.

Further, as is my regular practice, I avoided reading any advertising and marketing materials until after listening was completed.  The purpose being to listen with as few planted notions as possible.  

A generic cable example: is there a metallurgical reason why silver cables sound brighter than copper ones in lengths typical to audio applications?  I’ve heard this ‘brighter’ claim from both audiophiles and manufacturers.  I read this as perception based on the notion that silver looks brighter than copper and somehow we expect it to sound brighter. And then of course it does. 

Expecting subtle difference, if any, from the far cheaper DH Labs wire, I started with some of the best-recorded tracks I have.  Dave’s True Story, Hans Theesink, David Johansen, et. al. – all uncompressed, clean, and spatially expressive (how’s that for audiophile-speak?) recordings.  If the Swords had more to offer than the T-14s, I’d hear it with these recordings.

They do and I did.  And damn if the timing didn’t jump out as being spot on – it’s right here in my notes.  I won’t break it down into the typical terminology of transparency, imaging and so on.  The Swords were better in every way than the T-14s.  The cliché of a veil being lifted was the case here.  The music was simply more alive.  It wasn’t a night ‘n day jump – I didn’t pick up an octave of bass, a lit from within quality or any other such nonsense.  However, it was easy to hear without having to listen for it.  An undeniable improvement heard by one who is very pro-denial in the cable world.

CONCLUSION

There is less correlation between price and performance with cables than any other major part of the audio chain.  Further, the money saved by using some of the good cheap stuff like Supra’s own Ply speaker wire and Dual interconnects will get you more boom for the buck elsewhere, particularly for systems around or below the $5K mark.  Skip the $500 or more toward cables and upgrade your speakers. Better yet, throw it toward the most cost effective upgrade extant:  room treatment.*

It is only after you’ve got your system (and room) singing and it’s at a certain price level, that expensive cables may become a decent value proposition.  At over $60/ft., the Supras were not a revelatory improvement, like, say, room treatment can be.

But now after attempting to talk you out of expensive cables, I’ll try to talk you into the Swords.  At $1105/3m pair, they are expensive, but actually mid-priced in the nutty world of wire. Swapping them in for my high value T-14s, the sound quality gain was subtle, but consistent  -- evidence of improvement rather than the mere change I’ve experienced with cables priced well north of the Swords.

From a guy who expects little of his cables, my highest praise:  the Swords do nothing, better than any other cable I’ve heard.  They are the nihilists of the cable world, which is everything I want.

  * a personal goal is to reiterate the room treatment/value gospel ad nauseum in reviews