Features
| Warranty length | Limited Lifetime |
|---|---|
| Brand | Chord Company |
Product Description
Chord Ohmic, supplied individually, is a silver-plated loudspeaker plug designed to bring both the electrical and sonic benefits of silver to speaker cables everywhere. The new plugs are available separately as a retro-fit upgrade, enabling this revolutionary 4mm connector to improve other brands of cable too.
Please note: this is the "crimp" version of the Ohmic plugs which require a special crimping tool to terminate to speaker cables (please contact us for details). We also sell a solder version
Silver Plated
For many years, Chord has been using silver-plated copper conductors paired with silver-plated connectors. Using silver in cables can be wrongly associated with a bright, overbearing sound characteristic. However, this brightness is actually caused by a poor choice of insulation material rather than the silver.
Why not gold?
Although gold is generally perceived to be the best plating material for high-quality connectors, its only major advantage is its total resistance to corrosion which is not normally a domestic issue. It is usually mistakingly associated with performance and quality due to gold’s high commercial value. Matters are further complicated by the various other plating materials on offer in the hi-fi industry (e.g. rhodium, copper, brass and nickel) with each having wildly differing prices and claimed performance levels.
The Science
Gold is the third most conductive metal available. It is outperformed by both copper (+140% better) and silver (+148% better). Better conductivity means lower resistance and therefore, less signal loss. Less signal loss means increased performance – as expressed by Ohm’s law! Hence the name of Chord's new speaker plugs.
Audibly Superior
Although pure copper is a good conductor, at room temperature it is susceptible to oxidisation and drastically drops in conductivity when oxidised. Plating the copper can protect it from this process. Plating materials include tin, nickel and rhodium (12%, 33% and 50% as good as gold respectively). Crucially, silver-plating not only makes sense from an electrical point of view, it gives an audibly superior result during listening tests when compared with gold plated connectors.
Please Note:
Please note these plugs are crimp only requiring a Chord HEX or other specialist crimping machine, please ask for further information.
