Chord Cable / The Chord Company USB A-B Cable Chord Signature Super ARAY (2m)

New, original box, 2m long

Chord's first venture into USB cables was a consequence of having musicians (incl some in bands) working at the Chord Company. After copying a CD master recording to a laptop, they were shocked at the poor performance of the burned copies when compared to the original master CD.

At the time Chord were using one of the first DACs with a USB input, so they played the master from the laptop. Still not good but better than the burned CD version. After using better spec ripping programs and playback management, Chord thankfully got big improvements to the burned CD.

Whilst Chord were happy that they could produce a pretty decent CD copy from the original master, the laptop copy of the master (sent to the DAC via its USB input) sounded clearly worse than the CD copy being fed to the same DAC – so they investigated the construction of the USB cable between laptop and DAC.

After listening to a selection of available (and varying quality) USB cables, Chord realised this was an area worth exploring. The result was the Chord USB SilverPlus, launched in Sept 2011, with silver-plated conductors and high frequency effective shielding. Chord Signature USB followed in April 2013 and has remained virtually unchanged up till now (Aug 2018)

There are increasing numbers of high quality DACs (with exceptional USB inputs) and several high quality music streamers/servers with USB outputs. This has led Chord to revisit and improve the original Signature USB design

The original Signature USB featured four separately shielded conductors. Chord have now refined the effective gauge of the silver-plated copper conductors and upgaded the insulation to a high-speed PE/LDPE/PE composite dielectric. The earth shielding connection is further protected from high frequency noise with its own foil tape layer. The ARAY technology has been upgraded from Tuned ARAY to Super ARAY using a Signature USB specific ARAY design. Chord have incorporated refinements with both USB A and B plugs. All connections are soldered and the USB plugs are silver-plated to Chord's specification in the UK. Chord believe these changes have all contributed to a healthy improvement in performance. It is certainly a little harder (therefore longer) to build, so while the price has crept up from the original Signature USB, Chord feel it more than justifies the effort when you audition it against the original design.

There are many high-performance storage and streaming devices available and the new Signature Super ARAY USB is an obvious choice to try with these. Also worth trying between your PC/tablet and DAC, particularly if it’s full of decent rips of your own CD collection, high quality downloads or is being used for streaming hi-def music like Tidal etc.

Contact Enhancer Option
To ensure the best possible connection between your system, Future Shop recommends the DeoxIT Gold G-Series contact enhancer.

DeoxIT Gold is carefully applied to the plug contacts of your cable and is a unique conditioning solution designed to improve conductivity and provide long-lasting protection on gold, base metals and other precious metal contacts and connections. DeoxIT Gold penetrates plated surfaces, molecularly bonding to the base metals to seal and protect both surfaces.

The benefits of applying DeoxIT gold are:

Improved Conductivity
Maintained optimum signal quality
Reduced wear & abrasion
Prevents fretting/dendrite corrosion
Forms a protective anti-tarnishing coating
Stabilises connections between similar and dissimilar metals
Reduces arcing, RFI and intermittent connections
Please select this option from the above ‘Contact Enhancer’ drop-down menu and our engineers will apply the contact solution to your cable connectors prior to shipping.

Specification :
Super ARAY conductors, a revolutionary way of building audio interconnects that brings new levels of coherence, detail and involvement.
Precision silver-plated oxygen free copper twisted Bi-data conductors