With more and more hi-fi accessories available, buying can be a daunting task which shouldn’t be taken lightly.  Simon Pope and David Price round up two loudspeaker Cables, an interconnect and some supports.

LAT INTERNATIONAL BI-WIRE £25 PER METRE

This cable impresses even by its looks – it’s extremely well put together with good industrial-style LAT locking connectors (or banana plugs should you wish).  A four conductor cable using high quality PTFE  Teflon insulation, it’s unusual to find twelve gauge conductors – heavy-weight stuff for a bi-wire ‘speaker cable’.

The company uses a proprietary Silverfuse material for the conductor.  This is a ‘near alloy’ of silver and copper, not silver plating or cladding but the result of a process where copper wire is pulled through molten silver and the silver and copper are fused under high pressure.  The result is a sound which combines the best of both copper (smoothness) and silver (detail and clarity).  The shiny black outer jacket is stiff to prevent sharp bending of the cable.

This is an excellent sounding cable with superb imaging and detail, but it never sounds over bright or harsh.  The LAT suited the Eton Choirbook choral music perfectly, with impressive imaging, sound staging and detail retrieval,  With Talvin Singh’s Indian-influenced electro dance, it showed fine control over deep and powerful bass lines, with decent speed and extension too.  Upper frequencies were sweet and open and vocals well defined.  With Rock music there was great imaging and detail, with accompanying acoustic guitars well presented.

Although smooth and musical, you’ll also benefit from this cable if you have a system that’s slightly enclosed or claustrophobic sounding.  It will open things up with its sweet treble and specious imaging.  Good stuff indeed.

LAT International Biwire speaker cable £23/metre jjjj

This serious-looking cable aimed squarely at high-end system owners, and quite superbly constructed.  The termination plugs, in particular, are a step up from the norm, while the conductors are of 12-gauge, silver-clad oxygen-free copper insulated PTFE Teflon.

This combination conveys terrific bass weight, carrying with it plenty of pace and energy.  With suitably potent electronics you can follow each surge of low-end energy accurately, while the start and finish of each note is clearly defined.  The midrange had punch, too, although here the LAT can sound a little hard on occasions – it’s never harsh, but some of the sweetness of a cable such as the van den Hul CS122 (£13.50 in single-wire form) is missing.  Having said that, there is no shortage of detail or speed with this cable in place and the imaging quality is first rate.

LAT International – Biwire speaker cable “midrange – a little hard at times”

We would attribute this to the limitations of the system used for the test or that the cable was not correctly conditioned.  The cable supplied way back in Nov 99, burned in and ready for use.  If left unused for a long period of time, the cable would have lost it's conditioning and needed at least ten hours use before the test.