Down to the wire | Despite the naysayers, Transparent Audio says its pricey audio cables are the real deal
Josh Clark spends most of his workday in a room equipped with three stereo speakers as tall as he is and a subwoofer as big as a refrigerator. He sits in a comfy leather chair in this pleasantly peach-toned chamber at Transparent Audio's headquarters in Saco and listens to music of all stripes — acoustic jazz, orchestral classics, even old-school rock and roll.
In this studio, Clark doesn't have to worry about anything but sound, which itself, all alone and jacked up through hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment, can actually be a real worry. Clark is in search of pure music, or the clearest and closest approximation. "Imagine a piece of gauze and your sonic pattern is covered by this gauze," he says. "When you take it away, you have a transparent noise."
To get to this noiseless noise, Clark focuses on the one piece of stereo equipment most people ignore: the cable. Transparent Audio has manufactured and marketed unique, high-end audio cables for speaker systems since 1983. As manager of operations and product design, Clark, who has been with the company since 1997, is responsible for figuring out which cables work well, which need to be tweaked and how, and which prototypes are worth pursuing.
It's a job Clark, 33, never knew existed. But now, he's obsessed with cables. He's interested in figuring out how to bring the brilliance of great music to the homes of Transparent's customers, most of whom are audio hobbyists who love music. When Clark plays other peoples' music in this room, his youthful face lights up. "Everything matters," he says of the components of an audio system. "If you screw up on one part, it's gone."
Clark means the music is gone. And in his mind, nothing's worse than losing a good audio track to what he refers to as the "fogginess" "glare" and "brightness" — the kind of problems he says lesser cables often create.
Responding to static
But there are plenty in the audio world who think Transparent and other high-end cable suppliers are the real peddlers of foggy noise. "The exotic cable industry is a joke," writes Gene DellaSala, president of the Internet magazine Audioholics.com, in an email to Mainebiz. "It's all about HIGH profit margins, creating a fictitious problem based on poorly applied engineering principles, and soliciting reviews from technically incompetent reviewers that regurgitate the vendors' marketing literature."
DellaSala is one of many critics of high-end, high-priced cables like Transparent's that purport to improve the quality of an audio system's sound. Transparent's cables range in price from $25 a foot to $3,750 a foot, compared with cable rates between $3 and $17 per foot at Crutchfield, a popular supplier of audio and visual products based in Virginia.
It's this markup that really steams the skeptics. The debate about whether a good cable is worth the price has raged for decades, according to Boston-based audio expert Mark Dailie, who has worked with high-end audio equipment since 1978, first as a recording engineer and now as a test and measurement support manager for Listen Inc., a company that specializes in evaluating the quality of electroacoustic equipment. Dailie tested Transparent's cables at a Consumer Electronics Society show in 2004 and says the company's cables do, in fact, perform better than comparable products from Monster Cable, an industry leader that claims to be the first company to market high-end cables.
But Dailie can't point to statistical proof that these cables enhance sound because, he says, the cable technology has outpaced the measurement technology used to evaluate such products.
And even if there were a universal industry test, customers possess different audio sensitivities that often dull as they age. If your hearing is weak, you could have the best audio system in the world and it could still sound to you like an off-the-shelf stereo. For Dailie, the cables brought texture to the music that he had never heard before, like "a sheet had been pulled off the speaker." (For more on how Transparent tests its cables, see "Inside the sound," this page.) He says if cables can do that for you, they may be worth investing in. "If you don't mind spending the extra money and you can hear the difference, then go ahead and buy it," says Dailie. "If you can't, then don't. The audio system is only as good as its weakest link. Some people call [high-end cabling] voodoo, some people call it science."
The Grammy argument
But for every naysayer, there's a golden-eared listener who swears by the benefits of high-end cables. Take Bob Ludwig, Portland's best known sound engineer. President of Gateway Studios in Portland for 14 years, Ludwig has mixed albums for some of music's biggest stars, including Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. Ludwig mastered 22 Grammy-nominated albums last year. He also exclusively uses Transparent cable and swears by its quality.
"You can hear more music coming out of the speakers," Ludwig says. "It sounds even closer to the absolute sound. It's pretty undeniable."
Karen Sumner, president of Transparent, agrees. She notes that most of Transparent's distributors allow prospective buyers to test the company's cables at home before a purchase. "It's surprising the people who can't accept it," she says. "No one's going to buy it if it's smoke and mirrors."
Sumner started the company with her husband Jack Sumner and their friend Carl Smith in 1980. Back then, the fledgling company, Electrocompaniet, was located in the Sumners' colonial home in rural Hollis and didn't deal in cables at all. "We imported an amplifier from Norway and sold it to specialty research shops around the country," says Karen.
By the mid 1980s, Smith and the Sumners were ready to expand beyond the amplifier, which Karen says was too "fussy" for the American consumer. They joined forces with Bruce Bisson, a developer of the Music Hose, the first high-end cable sold by Electrocompaniet.
By 1985, Electrocompaniet had become Transparent Audio Inc. The company stopped importing amplifiers and began focusing exclusively on high-end cables. Today, Transparent posts annual sales between $6 million and $8 million, distributes its products to 80 U.S. retailers and 50 international distributors, and employs 17 people full-time at its 20,000-square-foot headquarters in Saco and 17 full- and part-timers who put together cables from home. (Ten of these assembly workers, says Clark, are local musicians.)
Bisson's company has since parted ways with Transparent, and all of the company's products — including audio cables, audio-visual interconnectors and power surge protectors — are designs created at Transparent after Bisson's departure.
The key to the company's success, despite the controversy surrounding its primary product, has been to covet distributors and customers who appreciate Transparent's niche products and the responsive customer service Karen says they are known for.
"We've never lost focus on what it is we are, which I think is very important," says Karen. "A lot of companies have lost their way in the switch from two channels to multi-channel hardware. We've always focused on doing something that's the best, not what necessarily appeals to everybody."
The sound of science
What makes Transparent cable superior to its competitors? There's no easy answer. If you ask them, Karen Sumner and Josh Clark will readily ramble off dozens of technically-dense reasons why the cable works the way they say it does, using words like "resistance," "capacitance" and "inductance." Similarly, skeptics like DellaSala have spent hours breaking down why the cables don't work using complicated mathematical equations and diagrams.
Basically, Sumner et al claim the cables work because they reduce the ambient radio frequencies most cables absorb from the air by transmitting the sound swiftly and with as little distortion as possible. There are hundreds of ways Transparent does this, Clark says, but some of the most important techniques include using metal wires with smooth surfaces to speed along musical electrons, custom-designing connectors to decrease interference where the cable plugs into audio equipment, and soldering a custom-designed "network" attachment onto each cable. The network, which bulges from the cable like a balloon, contains hardware to support ideal music frequencies, which are lower than radio frequencies.
Back in the listening room, Clark sits in the leather chair, hands on his knees, as a dramatic Mozart Mass with a full choir swells to its floor-rumbling peak. He lets the music surround him, overwhelm the room, just as it would if he were in a concert hall listening to that symphony and its full chorus. Then he changes the music. Now he's listening to a homemade recording.
"This is my friend's son; he's trying to start a singer-songwriter career," he says. He sits again, same position. A gentle, raspy voice fills the air. Clark can hear the strum of the boy's guitar, the tapping of his feet, his breath as he pulls away from the microphone.
"I guess that means, hey, I want to be with you," the boy sings.
The room feels small, like the home studio where the track was recorded.
"I'm getting too much of his voice behind me," Clark says, motioning to the speakers and the wood-paneled back wall.
He stands up slowly and walks to the computer player from which the voice continues singing. "What we do when we're making the decision on the sound, we listen to CDs, classical music concerts, everything. It takes years to decide not only what measures the best but what brings us closer to that musical event. If we can bring an experience like that into the home, that's exciting for us."
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