Chord Company Training Day, A Riot Of Colour And Sound

Francis and I were invited down to the Chord Company factory in Salisbury to see all the efforts that go in to making some of the best cables around.

The day started with a good old fashioned chat with the cable guru himself: Nigel, then a trip round the factory to see all the processes involved in hand terminating and testing the interconnects and speaker cables. This culminated in them letting us loose with the soldering irons and cutters to experience actually terminating cables ourselves. With a deep respect for the skills of Mike and the Chord workshop elves and an amazement at the attention to detail and accuracy of the work we headed off, without burned fingers!, to a great in house lunch cooked by the lovely Gillian.

The afternoon was spent with Matt who took us through a structured dem of the whole Chord range, I'm sure many of you will have seen him do this at The Bristol Show, but it is always a revelation how much more could be heard every time the next cable up was inserted into the reference system. It's not just the physical cables that are brightly coloured, they reveal layer upon layer of tonal colour as you go up the range.

After a good afternoon's listening we left with a much deeper appreciation, both of the effort that goes into the creation of these cables, and the effect they can have on a system. The other thing that really struck home about the Chord company is that it is full of genuinely nice people who care about what they do, and just as importantly are passionate about music!

So nice were they, that they even had a surprise for Boswell Bear which he is thrilled about!