ANALOGUE CABLES

Cables an area of the system which gets most ignored in the UK and this is partly because many of the traditionally British Hifi systems of old were never sold with good cables and didnt’ really improve even if you did add them. But seeing as the level of electronics now begins at such a high clean and transparent level for reasonable money, the Ancillary parts of the system are now more important than ever before, second really only to the Loudspeaker. With the rise in streamed and stored digital music, the home network has also become absolutely crucial and improvements made here often completely transcend the normal £/performance ratios we are used to.

“Ancillaries” then is a bit of a misnomer because these parts of the system are not ‘supplementary’ or ‘supporting’ but as important as any other category of product. Moving to a good loom of cabling, a decent suite of mains cables, or installing a high level mains distribution block, will often be an even bigger sonic upgrade than moving your Amplifier or DAC one rung up the manufacturer’s ladder. And that even holds true if you are using our cheapest components. Even small network improvements like a better USB or Ethernet cable can also effect bigger sonic improvements than actual box upgrades. Remember that a noisy cable will remain noisy no matter how good your principal boxes are so the treble might always sound truncated and splashy or those guitars a little too metallic and lean until you remove it from the system. Good wires, mains and isolation takes a poor system and usually fixes it, a mediocre system becomes magical and an already good system will go stratospheric.

Quite a few people find it difficult to enjoy this side of the industry and some struggle emotionally to pay good money for what is a series of wires or metal feet, which offer little in the way of pride of ownership or purchase excitement. I can completely empathise with that position but can only implore you to rethink everything that your head and heart is telling you and not neglect or compromise in these areas. An expensive wire is expensive largely because of the time consuming R&D that has gone into it and because there is no shortcut and you cannot get the same sorts of improvements by buying cheaper cables or somehow making your own.

Speaker cables and the USB cable (or primary digital cable) have a profound effect on a system. The global level of resolve and transparency of the entire system will be completely governed by these two cables and to a slightly lesser extent, the other signal XLR and RCA connections. As a dealer I know first hand just how much more you can extract from all these boxes when pushed with the best ancillaries. It is quite staggering. These amplifiers, preamps, DACs, streamers, CD players we all love buying, they are capable of so much more than most people have ever heard and a properly finished system with the noise tackled at each juncture, will always outperform an unfinished one with better boxes.

Our signal cable range at Lotus is very simple. We focus on just threee main brands. We do not believe in seasoning using cables but rather to open and reveal the system with the lowest noise wires possible. A cable should ideally not be heard. It should be linear, perfectly neutral with the best composure and dimensional stability possible. No frequencies should be manipulated, it should just reveal the system as best as possible at a given pricepoint.

When we began with Tidal Audio back in 2016, so neutral and invisible was its performance that it forced us to re-evaluate all the wires we sell. We trialled over 10 high end cable brands from all different parts of the globe and Tara Labs was the only product line that was not shown up in a Tidal system. That is to say, it possessed the same level of naturalness and linearity to still be imperceptible when employed in an all Tidal setup. The Tara range starts at very reasonable prices but then extends upwards to the highest levels seen in the industry.

Our most recent cable addition is something a bit different but quite possibly one of the most important and powerful brands to come to Lotus in the last 5 years. Hemingway Audio are from Korea and were introduced to us by Thrax Audio. Hemingway cables are linear and natural, they do not manipulate the tonality or frequency response of a system but what they do to the architechture of the sound is nothing short of incredible. Increased focus, a certain disciplined precision, saturated vividity, increased three dimensionality, exceptional timing, surefootedness and the ripening of instruments to new levels of timbral lucidity. In short, they banish noise in a very singular way and you can hear instantly that there is something taking place here which other cables simply do not do. So powerful is their ability to improve or even fix more modest systems that they will likely rewrite the rules of how much budget you feel should apportion to strands of wire. Like Tara and Tidal, their range extends to the highest performance levels and their products are truly transformational in a good or even a problematic system.

Lastly we have cables from Tidal who offer both the ‘Reference’ and ‘Assoluta’ ranges. The same level of neutrality and naturalness as our other offerings, they are supremely musical and are obviously especially suited to Tidal systems creating a final alchemy that is difficult to beat, although we do build many Tidal setups with Tara Labs now, slightly less rounded sounding and with many more performance level options.