inakustik’s new speaker cable slashes the price of air
High-end speaker cables can seem a fairy-tale land where sales patter and snake oil lubricate pricing until it climbs to seemingly outrageous levels for cables that may appear, at least externally, like any number of other cables.
On the other hand you have cable companies with products entirely unlike any other cables, and clearly highly engineered. One such is Inakustik, a German company which has been making cables since 1977, and whose use of ‘air technology’ insulation delivers a unique take on cable dielectrics.
The resulting performance has convinced Tim Wallis from Inakustik’s distributor here Audio Marketing. “A cable should not offer anything additional to your system, nor change anything,” he says. “It should simply reveal the quality of your equipment, and that neutrality is what makes Inakustik’s Air and Micro Air cables perfect for all reference systems.”
Inakustik’s latest creation is the Reference LS-404 Micro Air speaker cable. The new design retains the air-insulation concept from the successful higher Reference Air series, where a three-metre pair of speaker cables can set you back more than $10,000. The new LS-404 Micro Air configuration allows a somewhat more affordable solution: three-metre pairs terminated with banana plugs for $1600, or with spades for $1700. Bi-wire and custom lengths will be available as special orders.
Despite the more favourable pricing, the new designs maintain Inakustik’s use of air as a central component in the insulation dielectric, which the company claims reduces cable capacitance. Normal dielectrics can increase capacitance many times over, claims Inakustik, with the material that insulates a cable absorbing electrical energy and releasing it later, causing smearing to the music signal. Air does not do this, says the company, and is therefore the ideal insulator. A total of eight concentric high-purity copper conductors are used in the Reference LS-404 Micro Air in addition to the air dielectric (compared with 24 cores in the Reference Air speaker cable). The multicore architecture allows the magnetic fields of positive and negative conductors to overlap and neutralise, reducing the cable’s inductance, claims Inakustik. Surfaces are rhodium coated, with the screw connection of the spades manufactured from a single piece.