On the face of it, Carnival Silver plus breaks one of the firmly held design principles, namely “the performance of a conductor is critically affected by the choice of dielectric”. Up until now The Chord Company have always used Teflon® as a dielectric with silver plated conductors; this is because they believe that other materials adversely affect the sound quality. Carnival Silver Plus uses Polyethylene in a very clever way that minimises conductor/dielectric contact, overcoming the sound quality issues usually encountered when using silver with anything other than Teflon®

Using a variation on Chord’s current twisted pair design, Carnival Silver Plus features two sets of six identical heavy gauge silver plated oxygen free copper wires, (four sets in the bi-wire version). These wires are wrapped around a circular polyethylene dielectric in a spiral and each wire is held in place and prevented from touching each other with another circular polyethylene spacer between each conductor. The diameter of the spacers is crucial to the cable’s performance, as the spacers minimise conductor/dielectric contact and in effect produce a semi air-spaced cable, (a first at this price level). They also ensure that conductor spacing remains consistent regardless of the curvature of the cable and prevent the outer jacket from affecting performance. The outer jacket is clear PVC, which is a good choice being both flexible and strong.

Despite the complexity of the design, Carnival Silver Plus is no more difficult to terminate than any other speaker cable. The central polyethylene section is easily removed, as are the polyethylene spacers separating the conductors. Once this is done, the cable can be terminated with any available termination.

It is worth pointing out that although Silver oxidises, the oxides it produces are barely less conductive than the Silver itself, so there is not a problem with stripping the cable so that it can be fitted to a binding post if necessary.

Carnival Silver Plus has been developed for the hi-fi and home cinema enthusiast who demands real value for money performance. Long runs are not a problem and the cable is flexible enough to route discreetly. This is a genuinely affordable option for a high performance multi-speaker set up. As mentioned before, one of the problems with multi-channel systems is that the cost of speaker cable starts to look prohibitive. Carnival Silver Plus, by virtue of clever and innovative design, offers a really affordable high performance choice.

Speaker cable can have a profound effect on the overall dynamic performance of a system. During the design process of the Carnival Silver Plus, emphasis was put on obtaining equal and realistic dynamics throughout the frequency range to ensure that musical rhythm was not squashed or lost. Bass is controlled, powerful and tuneful and the midrange and treble are open and expressive.