The thing is, they weren’t wrong. The systems did sound inherently engaging and musical. What WAS wrong were the explanation that went with the demos. Back in the day, ‘consistency’ and ‘cables’ didn’t even register as topics in the audio discussion. Yet, despite that, those were two of the key aspects of classic Linn-Naim performance. It’s not just that Naim supplied all of the cables necessary to hook up their electronics (so that offering an alternative wasn’t just complicated by the connections, it was inevitably sunk by its additional cost) but the notion of consistency extended way beyond the cables and into the electronics themselves. The design approach and topology were unusually – almost dogmatically – consistent across the range, while the same cables were used for everything, also right across the range. Not only were the electronics and speakers voiced around the cables, but adding grist to the mill, the cables incorporated a nascent star-grounding system and employed minimalist, low mass connectors: mainly plastic bodied Din plugs and 4mm bananas. It’s no surprise that Linn/Naim systems had a pronounced house sound, or that their musical integrity was compromised as soon as you started substituting other components (or cables) within the chain. They were even one of the first systems to treat supports seriously – but that’s a whole different story that I’ll be getting to on another day.
It’s actually ironic that the Linn/Naim hegemony depended in part on their chosen cable system, given their violent and voluble rejection of alternative, audiophile cables when those products eventually emerged. But let’s not forget, they weren’t opposed to cables, just cables that came from anybody else! The arguments were varied, from the standard ‘Snake-oil’ rejections through to dire warnings as to the risk such cables presented to the Naim amplifiers. It was years before any substantial change arrived in Naim’s cable line and, when it did, it came from within the company itself. A company that has, only relatively recently started mounting RCA input socketry on its products as standard. Perhaps it’s no surprise that antipathy to audiophile cables remains so strong within the shores of the UK – yet for UK audiophiles, the evidence for adopting a coherent cable strategy is all there, if you just take a look.
Overcoming the embedded suspicion and burden of history also makes it far from surprising that modern cable strategies might have started in Japan but really flourished in Europe and the US. Jean Hiraga was the first Western journalist to talk about the audible impact of Japanese advances in cable metallurgy, and France still has a buoyant, specialist cable sector to this day. But it took the business mentality of the Americans to take cable and turn it into a mass-market product. Various brands emerged, but arguably it was Monster Cable (1979), followed by AudioQuest (c.1987) and Transparent (1993) that actually transformed the market. But the next step-change in cable performance didn’t arrive until some 10-years later, when Nordost started talking about, demonstrating and leveraging the benefits of a consistent approach to both their cable ranges and cabling a system. The rest is, as they say, history…
Towards a coherent cable strategy…
To really understand how the notion of technological and material consistency has shaped Nordost’s product development, it’s necessary to look beyond Blue Heaven 3 and consider the entire Leif family. Representing the gateway, or entry level, when it comes to Nordost’s cable products, the Leif family consists of four individual cable ranges, named (from bottom to top) White Lightening, Purple Flare, Blue Heaven and Red Dawn. The nomenclature dates back to the company’s earliest days, with the original Blue Heaven and Red Dawn amongst the first products to follow their Debut Flatline speaker cables. These days, it’s not enough to produce a speaker cable, with or without a matching interconnect. Every range in the Leif family offers single-ended and balanced interconnects, single-wired speaker cable and a power cord. White Lightning adds a Tonearm lead, Purple Flare a USB, while Red Dawn also offers a USB as well as custom/speciality terminations such as (you couldn’t make this up) Din plugs for Naim kit.
