Chord Rumour 2 Install speaker cable was the first speaker cable that Chord designed. Chord was already aware of the real benefits to be had from using silver-plated conductors in conjunction with Teflon® insulation. In the course of experimentation, they found that twisting the two conductors together bought some real and dramatic improvements.

There is nothing new about the use of twisted conductors in the manufacture of speaker cables, but at the time, this approach had fallen out of fashion in favour of heavy gauge parallel conductors. A lot of work was carried out to establish the number of twists required in order to optimise the performance.

Rumour uses 19 strands of silver-plated oxygen-free copper per conductor, surrounded by Teflon® insulation. The conductors are 16 gauge and although this appears to be surprisingly small for a speaker cable, its performance is anything but and its current capabilities are surprisingly high. The original version of Rumour was simply the above cable with no outer jacket. Teflon® and silver used in the construction of speaker cables have some real benefits. Teflon® will withstand very high temperatures and is resistant to most solvents. It is also extremely good at preventing air from reaching the conductors it surrounds and because of this, oxidisation of the conductors ceases to be a real problem. Further to this, although silver does oxidise, the oxides it produces are barely less conductive than silver. This means that the performance of the cable will remain consistent for many, many years.

Copper PVC cables will degrade quite severely over the years. PVC is hygroscopic, or put another way can be seen as a fairly porous material. Cheap speaker cables often use clear or translucent PVC as an insulator and if you look carefully, you will be able to see signs of oxidisation along the length of the cable. Silicon was chosen as an outer jacket partly for its flexibility and partly for its excellent mechanical damping

You can find out more about these products on the manufacturer’s website.