MAD SCIENTIST speaker cable 4 - Core

Black Magic Speaker Cables are a completely new design. We've actually been designing speaker cables for years but none have been either good enough or practical enough to make into a product. Until now..

This new design came about after a brainstorming session that asked the question "Why doesn't ordinary speaker cable sound good" (by this I mean the kind of stuff you get for a couple dollars a meter from the local electronics shop). After all there are people who will tell you that as long as the basic parameters (e.g. resistance) are OK then it can't possibly make any difference. So why do speaker cables sound different?

This produced a long list of possible answers, which we set about testing. For example, one idea was that the speaker and cable can act as a giant antenna and send that RF back into the amplifier, so this lead to idea of a "bad antenna" design to minimize pickup (and also transmission).

Another design concept was to create multiple symmetries. A simple example of a symmetry is a twisted pair - this rejects noise due to it's symmetrical construction. These cables go well beyond this, creating a whole bunch of symmetries.

How do they sound?

When I tried the first prototype I knew I had something special. The sound was clearer, more powerful than normal, but also more delicate, with big soundstage and large dynamic range. Also less confused with the different strands of the music keeping separate and not blurred together.

The final version has improved from there. I find that they are now very balanced, hugely musical and entertaining - they make you want to revisit your whole library.

Speaker Kegs

At each end of the cable you can see a pair of "speaker kegs". These are similar to the kegs we use on our powercords. However they are quite different - the power cords kegs are designed to pass 50/60Hz but the speaker kegs must pass the whole audio band. So these kegs are reformulated and tuned to this application.