Natural Selection

It’s what makes Brandt Audio Cables so different

 

When you hold a Brandt Audio cable in your hands it looks and feels different to any other hi-fi cable you’ll have come across.

It’s light and flexible and comfortable against your skin. There are no plastic or polymer outer materials, no heavy fillers or massive connectors, no filter boxes or battery packs. There’s nothing unnecessary or unnatural about a Brandt Audio cable. Instead, it is a unique combination of exhaustively selected materials and construction, entirely arrived at through critical listening. What you are holding in your hand is the result of thousands of hours spent auditioning each and every element of each and every cable. It’s the end result of an exacting, evolutionary process. A process that has sifted and sorted everything from conductors and connectors, to insulation materials and the finest points of construction.

A process that has created not only that unique collection of materials and constructional techniques, but one that has created a whole that’s both more and less than the sum of its parts: a whole that delivers more of the performance but that you hear less; a whole that delivers more music while you don’t even notice it doing so.

Conductors

Every conductor in every cable we make comprises specially selected, enamelled copper strands, carefully sized and silk wrapped to create a pure litz construction. It’s an approach that is both highly tunable and at the same time combines the advantages of solid-core and stranded conductors, offering longevity, flexibility and an absence of skin-effect degradation.

Construction

Individual, hand-built conductors are precisely twisted into pairs to create signal and speaker cables. Power cables employ three conductors. In each case the size of the conductors and the twist rate and tension in each cable has been exhaustively auditioned and is exactingly implemented, ensuring consistently excellent performance.

Insulation

Each pair of conductors is double insulated in natural cotton or linen. For the loudspeaker cables, we used an outer layer of woven agave (natural cactus fibre), which perfectly illustrates the extent of our search for carefully selected, even exotic, materials.

Connectors

We use carefully selected low-mass connectors with minimal metal parts. Why reinvent the wheel. The Eichmann RCA plugs are superb, while manufacturing and certificating our own AC or XLR connectors is simply beyond possibility. Instead, we have listened to every single one that is available and chosen the best. Just as every other part of our cables has been selected by ear.

But one thing we couldn’t find was satisfactory terminations for our speaker cables. Those we had to design and have specially manufactured, with heavy, 5 Micron gold plating directly onto the metal structure. Almost all of the commercially available alternatives use 2 Micron plating over a (magnetic) nickle layer, which damages both the musical properties and the longevity of the connector. We also spent considerable time and effort optimising the solder buckets on both the 4mm banana plug and the spade, to ensure consistent mechanical connection and musical results. Protective sleeves are lightweight and non-metallic.