There is a bit of a myth that says that the Cable Wars didn’t really start in earnest until Bob Fulton came along with his first custom numbers back in the late 70s. That’s true in the sense that the price of wire went up like a Roman candle after FMI and Monster got going, but it’s not as if we weren’t sensible to the differences that wires made before making and marketing wires became an industry.
I can remember that even back in the early 70s my audiophile chums weren’t using zip cord to hook their Hadley amps to their IMF Monitors. Oh, no. They had some “secret source” who supplied them with four-gauge high-quality-copper wire–stiff as rigor mortis–the bare ends of which they kind of hard-wired (if you can call applying massive swaths of electrical tape “hard-wiring”) to the Hadley’s outputs and the IMFs’ inputs. They didn’t believe in solder or connectors of any kind–just bare naked wire.
What brings this to mind is Tara Labs new Omega Gold speaker cable–which is the highest resolution, lowest-coloration wire of any kind that I’ve ever heard in almost forty years of listening. I thought the original Tara Labs Omega was the cat’s pajamas, but this stuff…well, it’s the cat’s tuxedo. I’ll be reviewing Tara’s new Omega Gold (and its equally wonderful new interconnect, Zero Gold) in the not-too-distant future. Yes, the stuff costs a fortune. And if you have a fortune, yes, it’s worth it, IMO. But that’s not the point of this blog.
What ties the past to the present here is the fact that Tara’s wire isn’t terminated with a spade or a banana or any kind of lug or plug. It’s as bare as the four-gauge wire my pals used back in the 70s! When’s the last time, I ask you, you saw an ultra-expensive audiophile cable with tinned tags of bare wire at either end? I haven’t seen them on a high-end cable in years. But Tara’s unterminated cables do raise an interesting question that, frankly, I can’t answer: Is the phenomenally transparent, high-resolution sound of Tara Labs Omega Gold due entirely to its internal architecture or is it also due, in significant part, to the fact that it doesn’t have a connector of some sort on either end? In other words, are we all missing a (slow) boat that Tara has caught when we don’t use unterminated speaker cable?
Like I said, I can’t answer this question, save to speculate in a commonsensical way that not soldering a connector to a wire is probably “better” than soldering a connector to a wire, in that you don’t have a plethora of different metals meeting up where the music meets the road (so to speak).
I’d certainly be interested to know if you guys have some thoughts on this subject. But, for God’s sake, don’t go tearing the terminations off your MIT or Transparent or Nordost because Tara Labs ain’t using them. Everything in a quality cable is designed for a reason, even if that reason is convenience (and, trust me, a tinned length of bare wire is NOT as convenient as a spade).
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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