The Chord Company PhonoARAY
By Roy Gregory
The Chord Company has been making quiet but persistent ripples with its neatly elegant, plug in, parallel grounds for a few years now. The small, tubular ARAYs might look like they’d be more at home on some upmarket cosmetics counter, but don’t underestimate their impact when it comes to cleaning up spurious noise, dropping the noise floor and sharpening up focus and dynamics in almost any audio system. They’ve become an essential component when it comes to system set-up and optimization around these parts – and plenty of other parts too!
So perhaps it’s no surprise that after dedicated ARAYs for pretty much every socket under the sun, those dedicated folks at The Chord Co. should turn their attention to the one realm where intrusive noise can do more damage than any other – phono-replay. In fact, given that the signal emanating from a phono cartridge is around 10,000 times smaller than the one that comes out of most digital sources, the only surprise is that it has taken so long.
Unlike the DI/lipstick-like form factor of the other signal ARAYs, the PhonoARAY is a chunky black cylinder. Measuring 10cm (4”) long and almost 6cm (a bit more than 2”) in diameter, its underside is machined flat and it sits on two, loosely affixed feet. With a substantial binding post mounted at each end and weighing in at almost a pound-and-a-half, it feels more like a stun grenade than an entirely passive audio component. With subtle engraved grooves and a central logo on the top surface, its solid and substantial presence certainly creates a positive impression. Just as well, as including the necessary ground wire to hook it up, the PhonoARAY will set you back a single English Pound less than four-figures. That’s right – £999: or, as much as many a tonearm cable and more than some tonearms or quite a few cartridges.
So – what is it, does it work and can it possibly be worth paying that much for a glorified ground connection?
The PhonoARAY is designed to sit between your tonearm (or record player, if it has a separate ground connection) and phono-stage. It’s designed to offer a better, quieter ground connection – which, given the tiny level of the signal generated by a moving-coil cartridge, should offer significant benefits. It does so in two ways: firstly, by filtering the ground signal to strip out high-frequency noise (a filter that works in both directions); secondly, by shielding the cable to prevent influx of RFI. Most tonearm grounds are unshielded, making them near perfect antennas. Back in the day, before wi-fi, mobile devices and ‘smart’ homes, that was probably fine: it definitely ain’t any more.
In most cases, you will connect the ground wire that is part of the tonearm lead to one end of the PhonoARAY and, using the cable provided, the other end to the ground terminal on your phono-stage or pre-amp. The PhonoARAY is supplied with a 0.5m Clearway, shielded ground cable to connect it to the ground terminal on your phono-stage. Now, while I’d hesitate to describe the Clearway as a “get you up and running” option (its performance is way better than that) I’m also certain that you can do better. Chord themselves seem to think so, given that their range offers both the 1m Clearway ground cable (£140) and the 1m Shawline ground cable (£280). Having experimented with the input cable to the PhonoARAY, I know just how big a difference cabling can make in this context and I suspect two things: once they realise the scale of its sonic and musical impact, a lot of serious analogue users are going to want to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the PhonoARAY, and; it’s early days for the product. If Chord are as astonished by its performance as I am, they’ll be offering better cable options, at order or as upgrades, sooner rather than later. So, if you are splashing out on the PhonoARAY, expect even more performance to become available over time. Will you be splashing out? I strongly suspect so! But first, a couple of niceties when it comes to set-up.
