As designers will often say, designing a product with a strict budget in mind is very often far harder than designing something state of the art.
Chord set out to achieve superb performance at a very affordable price. The SuperScreen mains cable delivers wonderful value for money at £65 for a one metre cable.
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Radical requests bring radical ideas and the price constraint involved a compromise on the cable or the shielding or a change of mains plugs.
In a move that may shock the audiophile community Chord has chosen a moulded plug.
Necessity is the mother of invention they say. Given the budget and the performance target, radical (to the audiophile community that is) ideas were tried. So the moulded plug was experimented with and listened to, both in conventional listening situations and blind. The results were conclusive: given the attention to detail of the internal wiring layout the moulded plug outperformed the more audiophile looking screwed on plug.
It not only out performed it when new but after a few weeks it “thrashed it sideways” as the screw connections became looser but the cold welded joints on the moulded plugs remained consistent.
The new Chord SuperScreen mains cable has been built using the same design principles as the Company’s award-winning Carnival SilverScreen speaker cable.
The SuperScreen mains cable employs the same contra-rotated overlapped dual foil shields used to such good effect on the Carnival SilverScreen, and borrows heavily from the configurations used throughout Chord’s range of products in that the high frequency effective heavy gauge foil shields are left fully floating.
Chord have long been aware of the need to minimize resonances and vibration within interconnects and speaker cables. Mains cables are no exception and the carefully directionalised high quality multi-stranded copper conductors are surrounded by a dense but flexible PVC insulation.
The contra-rotated dual foil shields are surrounded by another layer of vibration damping translucent insulation as used on the company’s Epic and Carnival SilverScreen speaker cables.
Mains cables are a critical part of any hi-fi or home cinema system. Chord has experimented extensively with the SuperScreen mains cable and feel that it is one of the most cost effective upgrades the company has yet offered. It delivers an improved dynamic performance, greater levels of clarity and a much improved soundstage. The SuperScreen mains cable can also bring dramatic improvements to the contrast, clarity and detail levels of today’s high resolution, flat screen televisions. Chord recommend that anyone using a flat screen as part of a home cinema set up should try the SuperScreen mains cable.
