AliceThe Chord Company has launched its new Shawline cable range, which has been carefully designed, harnessing 30 years of UK design experience to do, well, nothing.
No it’s not April 1st, The Chord Company really has launched a cable range designed to do nothing.
What The Chord Company means by ‘nothing’ is no colouration, stating that ‘colour comes from the music not the cables; no signal loss: anyone can make a cable, Chord makes Tuned ARAY cables; and no interference: Chord cables have wide bandwidth, high-frequency-effective shielding’.
What The Chord Company’s new Shawline cables can do, however, is carry a musical signal with ‘an extraordinary degree of detail and accuracy’.
Comprised of analogue and loudspeaker cables and featuring the company’s proprietary Tuned ARAY technology, the same conductor geometry as seen in Chord’s Sarum Tuned ARAY cables is now available with Shawline. The lineup sits neatly above the entry-level C-series and the highly affordable Clearway range.
The new Shawline analogue interconnect – available in DIN, RCA and XLR versions – uses the same Tuned ARAY technology and shares the same mixture of transparency and musical coherence as found in Chord’s Sarum Tuned ARAY cable.
Fitted with silver-plated Chord VEE 3 RCA plugs with PTFE insulation, Shawline’s conductors are built from silver-plated multi-strand oxygen-free copper, insulated with PTFE. Its unique shielding is designed to work across a wide frequency range and reduce mechanical noise. The conductors are contained within a specifically chosen outer jacket to ensure flexibility and to further reduce mechanical noise.
Shawline Digital
The all-new Shawline Digital uses proprietary ARAY conductor geometry developed for digital cables.
Also fitted with silver-plated Chord VEE 3 RCA plugs with PTFE insulation (or high-performance silver-plated BNC connectors), the new design features a tri-conductor configuration, optimised for digital signal transmission.
Further features include silver-plated, PTFE-insulated conductors with an internal PVC jacket that reduces mechanical noise and correctly spaces the high-frequency-effective high- density braid and foil combination shield.
Shawline loudspeaker cable
Completing the range is a high-performance shielded loudspeaker cable – Chord’s most discreet and flexible shielded speaker cable to date.
The Shawline loudspeaker cable is a new design featuring silver-plated conductors and high-frequency-effective shielding. 16 AWG multi-strand silver-plated conductors with PTFE insulation are employed in a twisted-pair configuration, with a PVC internal jacket to minimise mechanical noise.
Shawline loudspeaker cables are available off-the-reel and in factory-terminated lengths, the latter fitted with Chord Company gold-plated banana plugs.
Pricing and availability
Shawline: available now
Analogue RCA 1m: £200; additional metres £80
Digital: RCA 1m: £200; additional metres £80
Speaker: £30p/m unterminated; factory Banana/Spade terminations 8 plugs one pair £100