An Affordable Cable That’s As Good As The High-Priced Stuff?
- BLOG
- by Jonathan Valin
- Dec 23, 2008
I know this will seem like a considerable departure from my usual playing field, but an extremely affordable Litz-wire interconnect from ultra-high-end Japanese manufacturer Audio Tekne, handmade by the wife of Mr. Imai (the designer of all Audio Tekne gear), has come my way and it has all the makings of a genuinely terrific bargain. It is exceptionally high in transparency, low-level resolution, and sheer naturalness from top to bottom (and I’m talking in comparison to the best interconnect I know of, $12k/m Tara Labs Zero). It may not be the Zero’s match, but for 4.5% of the Zero’s price ($550/meter-pair) it is phenomenally good.
I haven’t tried the Audio Tekne speaker cable yet, nor have I heard an entire system wired with ARC-500 (I’m mixing it with a little Zero Black and with Omega Gold speaker cables until I can get the whole Audio Tekne schmeer). But if the speaker cable is as swell as the ARC-500 interconnect we may have one of those rare price/performance breakthroughs in the very area that seems to rub audiophiles rawer than any other. For the time being I can say this: I’ve mixed and matched many other interconnects with Tara Labs and none of them, no matter what its price, has “fit in” as seamlessly as the Audio Tekne.
Here is the Audio Tekne price list:
ARC-500 all litz wire interconnect with RCA, 0.7 meter=$460.00 pair
ARC-500 all litz wire interconnect with RCA, 1 meter= $550.00
pair
ARC-500 all litz wire interconnect with RCA, 1.5 meter=$650.00 pair
ARC-500 all litz wire interconnect with RCA, 2 meter=$800.00 pair
ARC-500 all litz wire interconnect with XLR, 1meter= $500.00 pair
ARC-500 balance all litz wire interconnect with XLR, 1.5 meter=$575.00
pair
If you’re interested in getting information about Audio Tekne interconnect and cable, call or write:
Tangram Audio
Yujean Kang
3131 Piccolo St.
Pasadena, CA 91107
(626) 689-8904
info@tangramaudio.com
tangramaudio.com
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
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