Warm Audio Professional + Premium Cables
SERIOUSLY GOOD CABLES FOR SERIOUS PLAYERS.
Some claim that cheap cables treated with care will do everything an audiophile requires of them. Others are in the “you get what you pay for” camp. In the competitive gear marketplace, every product requires its own assessment – snake-oil salesmen rub shoulders with honest brokers trying to sell an excellent product. Most would agree that Warm Audio fall into the latter camp, what with the acclaim they’ve earned for their preamps, compressors and EQs. Now with their rack gear a fixture of many professional and project studios, they’ve dropped a line of cables for us to check out.
AG were provided with an assortment of cables – TRS, TS, XLR, and XLR to TRS – in Warm’s Professional and Premium designation. The Professional cables here are similar to the so-called “Neumann” design of your run-of-the-mill pro cable – Warm’s take on a classic, if you will. The Premium ones are double the price, and sport higher-quality, gold-plated components and two additional technologies: StarQuad construction and Double-Reussen shielding.
Put to the test in my mix room, all cables sounded excellent, and were notably cleaner than some of the cheaper spare cables sitting in my drawer. Since sounding clean and transparent is what a cable is supposed to do, that doesn’t leave me with a great deal more to describe in the review. So instead, I’m going to summarise the tech behind this line – that is, why it sounds clean and therefore you might consider purchasing it.
Your standard balanced cable (Warm’s Professional line) contains three wires. One ‘hot’ wire carries the signal, one ‘cold’ wire carries a phase-flipped copy of the signal, and the third wire runs to ground. As audio is carried along both the hot and cold wires, it accrues unwanted radio interference (RFI) via electromagnetism.
At the end of the cable run, components sum the hot and cold cable, with the phase inverted one returned to normal polarity. Since the noise is now phaseinverted, it gets cancelled out.
The signals are in phase, and get amplified. This is basic balanced noise cancellation!
However, noticeable RFI can still creep into a normal balanced cable because of how the wires are physically wrapped, meaning either the hot or cold wire picks up more RFI than the other. This asymmetrical RFI will slip past the phase-inverting clean-up at the end of the cable run. The symmetrical physical placement of StarQuad minimises this asymmetrical RFI, and is generally understood to reduce this noise by up to 20 decibels in practice. I don’t have space to go into more detail, but I did notice an improvement in my testing.
RFI abounds in the modern world. Monitor screens and WiFi technology are just some of the RFI heavy technologies that we will find within a modern studio or the environment that houses it. It is not hard to imagine how this extra degree of noise minimisation could be a welcome solution for many musicians.
In addition to the StarQuad technology, the Warm Premium line offers Double-Reussen shielding, which basically just doubles the normal RFI-excluding barrier that protects the signal-carrying core of the cable. On top of this extra protection, Warm’s Premium cables come with woven coatings for better durability, and a lifetime warranty. This latter feature is truly peachy, and makes throwing down the extra cash for this premium lead all the more compelling.