AudioQuest Type 4 Speaker Cable

It was a new height in neurotic system upgrading for me. I was lying on the floor, inhaling a whole warren of dust bunnies I had re-disturbed from behind my speakers as I was maneuvering around. Was I installing a new amplifier? No, nothing so grandiose. Perhaps a new set of cables? Again, nothing quite that complicated. In fact, the sole purpose of my tinkering, which went on for a few hours, was focused on less than three inches of wire. I mentioned the results of that investigation in my NEAR 50Me II review. You see, the biwire-capable NEARs came with four metal jumpers connecting each pair of binding posts together for those running a single run of cable to the speakers. I'd been advised that this small piece of metal was quite a bottleneck to the overall performance of the speakers, so I collected up half a dozen different types of speaker-cable fragments and tried each to figure out what worked best in that application. While most of what I tried was a significant step up from the factory-installed jumpers, by far the best results utilized a disassembled piece of AudioQuest Type 4 speaker cable. I was impressed enough that I decided I should try out a full-length run of the cable to connect my speakers with.

The Type 4 I had bought a year ago was a pretty straightforward design. Four 18-gauge conductors, made of solid long-grain copper (a premium version of the usual oxygen-free high-conductivity copper), were spiraled inside an insulating jacket. For the jumpers, I had torn the jacket off and used the individual 18-gauge wires. The current production of Type 4 is designed a bit differently. Instead of two pair of 18-gauge wires, there's one pair at 17 gauge and another at 20 gauge. That's the effective area of a single 15-gauge core. AudioQuest claims that using similarly sized but slightly different conductors helps smooth out the flaws present in each individual strand. They've dubbed this type of design their "Spread Spectrum Technology." Now, I work with SST in the communications industry every day, and the engineers I deal with got quite a laugh at how AQ is using that buzz-phrase when I brought it up one day. But if you can forgive the choice of words that AudioQuest is marketing the idea under, it seems like a solid concept.

My last round of speaker-cable testing left me with the impression that I prefer designs with a moderate number of solid-core wires inside. None of the under-$80 designs I'd tried then were really totally satisfying on their own. A 10' length of Type 4 retails for $95 terminated, which isn't too much more, with the bare cable running $2.50/foot. The default connectors are soft 1/4" spade lugs that are crimped on tightly enough to get what AudioQuest calls a "gas-tight cold-weld connection." This is when enough force is applied to "cause a change in the shape of the materials at the surface where they meet." When the fit is that tight, soldering afterward will help hold things in place without the solder flowing into the electrical joint. Since solder isn't the best conductor in the world, the Type 4 connection should give better performance than something that is crimped together haphazardly, where the solder provides the main pathway for electrons to flow between conductor and connector. I hate dealing with spades all the time, so I also tried a set of the matching banana adapters. They'll set you back an extra $60 for a complete set, and they fit very snugly over the spades. You can also get the cable terminated with 3/16" or 5/16" spades, as well as the ever-popular pins. Some dealers will assemble custom cables out of the Type 4 wire for you, often at a cost savings. Just be aware that in those cases, you may not get the same termination quality or labeling as the factory-assembled cables. You can tell the official AudioQuest product because it will be shipped in one of the AQ boxes for retail sale.

I'm generally more interested in a full-range cable than biwiring, as that capability only applies to one speaker in my collection. You can order Type 4 in a single-biwire configuration, where the last few inches of the speaker end of the cable splits to termination with two pairs of connectors. Also available is a double-biwire run, which splits into two cables after a few common inches at the originating amplifier end, where one set of spades makes for an easier connection. This sort of focus on ease of use permeates AudioQuest products. All of their speaker cable is prepared very professionally, with clearly labeled "amp" and "speaker" ends. Anyone who's ever had to squint in a poorly lit environment to find tiny arrows indicating cable direction will appreciate the thought that AudioQuest puts into making their products easy to install and work with.

For the previous few months, I'd been using 8' of DH Labs T-14 cable for treble and 10' of TARA Phase II/TFA for bass. While this was the best combination I came up with, I wasn't really satisfied with it. I put my old Type 4 jumpers back in place and replaced both sets of cable. Hooking up the Type 4 in place of my existing speaker cable was simple enough. The gold-plated soft copper spades deformed a bit as I twisted hard on the binding posts, molding into the space available. I liked this considerably better than the usual hard connectors, where it's tough to tell how much force you should apply. AudioQuest's somewhat squishy copper provides much better tactile feedback as the nut bites down hard.

The sound was very good-better than I'd hoped for even. I had been compulsively swapping speaker cable every few weeks for quite some time at that point, not perfectly happy with anything I'd come up with. So when I tell you the Type 4 stayed in place for several months without any compulsion to switch, that should say something right there about how well it presents music.

After that rather soothing long-term usage, I sat down one day and considered carefully what I was listening to. About the only thing I really was bothered by was the bass. It was a bit too heavy. This is not to say that Type 4 caused that, it's merely the overall result with that cable in place given the rest of my equipment and room. Now, when you're carefully tuning your system with any mechanism, be it cable changes or some other method, it helps to remember the effects of every individual change you've tried in the past, even if it didn't seem beneficial at the time. The idea here is that, after changing some part of the system in a way that's an obvious improvement, you may find a new synergy with an adjustment that didn't seem a step in the right direction before. Since my problem at this point was overly fat bass, there were two sets of things to consider. I could try to change something that would attenuate the problem a bit. The alternate approach would be to elevate the midrange and treble output. I suddenly remembered when I had heard the opposite effect of my current problem. The last time I removed the grilles from the speakers, the treble seemed too hot and the bass a bit weak in comparison. I hadn't tried it again since, but now seemed a perfect time.

Ah, that was exactly what I wanted to hear. This was easily the best I'd ever heard the speakers sound. The 50ME IIs really do sound better with the grilles off when the rest of the equipment is matched just right. Encouraged, I grabbed my old cables again to revisit how they compared with the Type 4.

Compare and contrast

The DH Labs speaker cable remains the best I have at really throwing top-end detail into sharp focus. This manifests itself in a couple of ways. In recordings with noticeable hiss, the hiss is louder with the T-14 than the Type 4. I've always been struck by how well the DH Labs cable resolves the low-level aspects of acoustic guitar. AudioQuest's cable doesn't quite compete in this regard. But when you start getting into low-frequency material, the Type 4 is the obvious winner. It sounded like I was getting an extra 10Hz of bass extension. The T-14 seemed somewhat muddy, without nearly as much power or impact in the low frequencies.

The TARA Phase II/TFA has been the cable I use to compensate for the somewhat diluted bass of the DH Labs T-14. In a direct comparison with the Type 4, the TARA cable seems at first to be competitive. Upon further listening, though, I noticed that the warm low frequencies just seemed more prominent because of the poorly resolved higher frequencies. If you concentrate on just the impact of the deeper bass, the TFA Phase II/TFA seems somewhat slow and plodding in comparison with the tighter control of the AudioQuest cable.

Let me head off the usual abuse I get after writing comments like those directly above. I know I didn't touch the hot buttons of people who are more concerned with imaging or some notion of "realism" than regular tonal-balance concerns. Because of the extra high-frequency emphasis, the DH Labs cable naturally gives a more spacious image than the Type 4. The less-detailed TARA cable provides much less of an impressive soundstage. Whether either of these are an improvement or instead a euphonic exaggeration is totally dependent on the system in which the cables are compared.

If you've gotten the impression that I liked AudioQuest's Type 4 speaker cable, you're quite correct. I haven't heard anything less expensive than this that is as well balanced and appropriate for such a wide range of systems. While I've found that small improvements continue to accumulate as you move up to speaker cable costing several hundreds of dollars, these are fairly minor refinements compared with the big jump you get going from a cheap cable to Type 4. If the Type 4 is in your price range but you were thinking of spending a bit less, I seriously recommend stretching your budget some and trying out this excellent cable value from AudioQuest.

...Greg Smith (gsmith@westnet.com)

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