Sonic Art is going ZEN....

[SonicArt]

The last 2 years I have had many inquiries about speaker cable, do I have any left, will I be getting it made again, will I be developing a new cable, well the answer is yes to the last query 

 

I thought about doing another run of Ebony speaker cable, looking back it was an incredible bargain for the performance, the materials alone these days have climbed so much in price since I did the last big batch maybe 10yrs ago that doing another run even a couple thousand feet would be quite frightening in price, the cable would be double what it sold for which means a 3m set terminated would be close to $1000.

And there were some compromises in the design, I would have liked it heavier in the larger conductors it had, and more conductors, but it needed to be affordable at the time and perform to a level where cable twice its price was no better. The design succeeded this but there can always be more, or different, what I was looking for was different, I wanted something fuller sounding on today's often more analytical  predominantly digital gear.

I have listened to some quite expensive cables over the last couple of years, anything from $1000 a set up to around the 8k mark. Most were no better than my biwired set of Ebony, different maybe, but the difference was usually rolled off, not more bottom end weight or depth, just rolled off in the top making them sound mellow but at the same time detached, stage depth and width gets squashed when you start trying to attenuate the top end with cables.

One cable stood out, it beat the Ebony, and I really enjoyed using it in the system, it was an 8ft set of cable, it was using copper, and many of the materials and ideology was in sync with my own, aerospace component sourcing, purpose drawn copper that didnt have the whole alphabet behind it to try and convince you it must be good, clean design, expensive, overpriced here due to the costs added to it but reasonable priced OS.

I wont go into what it is, suffice to say it awoke my ideas of making speaker cable by hand again (used to do it decades ago) and utilizing my machining skills and access to hi quality materials to create a cable that emulated what I was hearing as closely as I could get, whilst still remaining affordable to us everyday hicks

 

So the journey began early this year, and I now have a quite nice design that has been demo'd recently to an old customer with a very revealing system, and some $1k hybrid copper/silver cables, he is now waiting on his set of the new Sonic Art 'ZEN' speaker cables...

 

Next post I will go into the design more and offer up a pic.

[SonicArt]

The last week I have been working on updating the website, and on the final finished look of the cable, I have delivered the first set to a local customer, and have materials on hand, nicely machined end caps and connectors ready to go.

 

A little rundown, the cable is built using a Japanese hi purity copper wire, variostrand which is basically multiple conductors of different cross sectional area. each channel has 8 conductors, 4 for each terminal with a cross sectional area of 7.5mm2. The conductors are twisted sets of 4 which are then twisted together for the full length. There is approximately 12cm protruding from the end caps. This is insulated to protect the PE jacket and colour coded.

Connectors are either 'The Bullet' 4mm beryllium copper banana plugs gold plated, or my Sonic Art Copper spades, a new screw terminal spade that is made from straight copper gold plated.

Here is a pic of the cable, one channel:

 

I have a limited batch of components, sheathing end caps and connectors will be the thing to slow down production initially, but I am trying to get a good supply of these into stock over the coming month.

Link to the speaker cable page:

https://www.sonicartaudio.com/estore/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=41_2

 

 

[rossb]

I have had my Sonic Art Zen speaker cables for a week or so now, and I have been very impressed by their performance. Very resolving, tonally rich, deep bass, and very smooth. Mark burned mine in for couple of days before posting them, but they still needed a few more days to open up and I suspect they are still running in. Overall, these are great cables by any standard and very good value compared with their competition.

[SonicArt]

Thanks so much for the feedback Ross, glad you are getting the balance I was aiming for!

I have done links as well for biwiring and will post up about them later today...