Experience 660-S loudspeaker cables from Wire on Wire
31st January 2020
Wire on Wire Experience 660-S tunable loudspeaker cables
HiFi+ Equipment Review
By Paul Messenger
A one-time osteopath called Chris Bell has created Wire on Wire, which is a very clever and unusual cable company, based on his personal experiences as a hi-fi enthusiast. Over a great many years, he tried a number of cable types, coming to the conclusion that: “Every ‘highly recommended’ cable that I ever bought seemed to be at least one tweak away from musical nirvana!” This led to a decade of experimentation into cable geometry. One test involved comparing tightly and loosely twisted pairs of wires (of equal length). The actual capacitance difference between the two was quite modest, and the differences were mostly to do with imaging, rather than specific detailing. He also investigated conductors of different gauges and discovered that constructional ‘messiness’ also had some sonic advantages. The result is the hand-braided, open weave cable with ‘REDpurl’, or ‘Adaptive Asymmetric Geometry’ tuneable spacers that Hi-Fi+ found so useful in interconnect form that it received an Award in 2019. Now, however, it’s the turn of the Experience 660-S silver-plated-copper loudspeaker cables, albeit used in conjunction with the Experience 880 interconnects. The Experience 660-S cables feature a seemingly random looking weave of PTFE jacketed silver-plated copper conductors (toward both ends of the spider’s web of weave, they diverge with an all-blue conductor group, and a blue weave around a red conductor group, to denote polarity). There are deliberately larger gaps in specific parts of the weave designed to accept the REDpurl spacers (trying to shoe-horn them into other gaps can damage the cable and is not covered by warranty). I ‘messed around’ by fitting the 5m long Experience 660-S speaker cable with a number of spacers and found that adding a spacer at Weave 7 gave some improvement. Adding a spacer at Weave 58 also seemed to improve the focus but introducing another one at Weave 54 was clearly a backward step. Adding a spacer at Weave 53 did help slightly, while dynamics were further assisted by adding at Weave 51. As with the interconnects, experimentation is key to getting the sound to snap into focus in your system. Ultimately, while I regard pure silver as a superior conductor to silver-plated copper (though whether the price difference is justified will always be a matter for debate), amongst those using silver-plated copper Experience 660-S would seem to be in the upper tier of performance even before you take the tuning capability into account. Add in the tuning options and Wire on Wire Experience 660-S makes excellent sense for those willing to take the to time fine-tune their system. The sound such systems produce can only be enhanced by the ‘tuneability’ of the Wire on Wire approach.
Issue 179 January 2020
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS Conductors: Multi-stranded, silver plated copper, 16-22 AWG Insulation: PTFE RFI rejection: Modified twisted pair Geometry: REDpurl™ Price: £240 per metre pair Manufactured by: Wire on Wire URL: wireonwire.com Tel: +44(0)1372 800605
