ChorAlloy – new tech from Chord
When I went to visit Chord cables an age ago, we had two sets of promotional staff talk to us assembled press and dealer types. One person was all about emotions and “can you see the look on the singer’s face the better now you can hear it that well?” The other was all about physics, telling us about contact bounce and how solid acrylic plug covers were hellishly expensive but could reduce this.
There was even a cable for speakers that sounded better when connected one directional way rather than the other. This defies the rules as we understand them, but you can HEAR it and point at it! They made ME choose which was the ‘wrong way around cable’ and I did and then got a bit aerated as I wanted to know WHY?
It transpired that Chord themselves has found this quite by luck and had asked the USA military supplier that had sold them the cable after ascertaining that they were ‘mostly harmless’. Their response was that they too had no idea and simply drew an arrow on the drum ‘and used it thusly’.
Chord have a new electroplating method or alloy that they are now using, called ChorAlloy, to improve contact at the plug-holes in your HiFi and have sent us this release.
“Chord Company is progressively upgrading a number of its cables’ connectors with its new ChorAlloy plating technology, the company’s next-generation plating system.
ChorAlloy is a multi-metal plating technology that provides a significant upgrade over the company’s previous silver plating and marks a major step forward in connector performance. Its myriad benefits include much lower intermodulation, full solderability and crucially, a tarnish-free finish.
Chord Company technicians previously identified the detrimental effects of tarnish (silver sulphide Ag2S) in silver connector plugs, noting Ag2S can give rise to intermodulation effects at high frequencies, which led to the development of the ChorAlloy project.
The new ChorAlloy-plated connectors/plugs are already rolling out of the Wiltshire factory and are available on the VEE3 and PTFE RCA/phono connectors, ChordOhmic speaker connectors (spade and 4mm banana), USB types A and B and now, BNC connectors along with DIN/XLR connecting pins. C-series, HDMI and streaming cables, plus mini-jack connectors remain unchanged.”
It looks handsome, too!
About Chord Company
Chord Company is the UK’s leading high-performance A/V cable manufacturer. The company has been painstakingly designing and hand-building superior audio cables in Britain, for discerning customers in over 50 countries, for more than 30 years.Chord Company is driven by an uncompromising desire to make music ‘live’, regardless of source. The Chord team takes enormous pride in delivering this goal, resulting in class-leading cable products, whether standard or bespoke. In-house design and manufacturing
