March 2019
Black Cat 3200 Series Interconnect, Speaker& Digital Cable
My system become a sonic time machine.
Review By Tom Lyle Casio calculator fx 991ms user manual.
BlackCat Chris Sommovigo has been designing andmanufacturing cables for the high-end audio industry since 1992. In his words,he has been 'running in the opposite direction of what most audiophile cablecompanies seem to be doing. When others offered to the audiophile community 'big,fat interconnect and speaker cables loaded with unnecessary conductor density',he marketed 'slimmer cables that had conductor density that was moreappropriate, and addressed issues such as proximity effect, skin-effect, andvelocity'. When all the other cable companies began offering digital cables, herecalled that 'these were actually what most would consider analog cables, butthey simply repackaged them as digital. But I marketed impedance-critical, superwide-band cables that met the digital specifications precisely'. And when othersstarted selling what he calls 'cable sausage', that was 'squeezed out of hugeindustrial thermoplastic extruders', he countered with 'high-tech insulatorsthat had to be braided and knitted onto the conductors in order to achieve bestperformance'.
He went on to say that since old habits dieshard, the demand for big, heavy cables with 'shiny jewelry attached' remainsattractive to many audiophiles. He had even been asked by some dealers anddistributors if he would be able to manufacture 'giant anaconda-like cables',because this would help them market his cables. He said no, because he wanted 'topreserve my own integrity and the integrity of my design philosophy. From myperspective, there is a right way and a wrong way, and this is something thathas been clear to me, if not to anyone else'. After email exchanges and speakingover the phone with Chris Sommovigo a few times, it also struck me that he hasmore technical knowledge with regard not only to cables, but audio in general,than any cable manufacturer I've ever met. His cables might not look fancy, butit seems as if he has many good reasons to design them the way he does. Andspoiler alert: his cables sound like it. I've had some very pricey cable in mysystem, and even though his cables cost much less, the Black Cat Series 3200cables can compare favorably to many of them. And sound better than many ofthem, too.
Black Cat 3202 Interconnect
This cable began experimentally as an eight-element 'matrix'style conductor (eight individually-enameled, 36 AWG conductors formed in atubular braid) braided over an insulated copper micro-tube (which is a conductorthat has been unique to Chris Sommovigo designs since the early 2000's). Atfirst Chris thought that the arrangement seemed counterintuitive, because thebraided outer conductor is the signal-layer, and the internal copper tube wasthe ground plane. And yet, the resulting sound took him by surprise, because hefound that it had a new level of musicality. For the 3202 he increased theconductor mass in the outer braid by four times by creating a 32-element matrixof 36 AWG pure copper conductors, and at the same time he decreased thedielectric constant, and employed a new process called 'Airwave', which ensuredthat a rather small center conductor would remain uniformly positioned in theair-dielectric of a thin-walled Teflon tube. This ensured that the magneticfields generated by the signals traveling through the outer matrix would not besubjected to 'braking', that might be induced in the ground plane if it weredeployed in the traditional manner, as a densely-woven grounding shield in theouter valence of a coaxial cable geometry.
Black Cat Systems Usb Users Manual Instructions
A benefit of this new geometry was an 'extraordinarilylow' capacitance, which is very desirable when it comes to interconnects. As asmall company with his own methods and machines, Black Cat is able to explorethese ideas without having to engage subcontractors. When he ran a small batchof these new cables with the 32-element matrix on the outside of a hollow,Teflon tube with a small twisted-pair of 'Airwave' magnetic wires suspendedinside the air tube, it was obvious that he was onto something. Replacing thecables in his system with this new design, he had a revelation, making him wantto redefine the definition of 'resolution'. He said that 'effortlessness' wouldbe a better term for what he heard with this new cable.According to Chris, this effortlessness means that with the 3202 interconnect 'thereis no sense of strain, the music emerges whole, unsullied by artifact, and thesystem itself fades away'.
3232 Speaker Cable
I lifted this description straight from Black Cat'swebsite, where it says that this speaker cable is a multi-layered cable thatbegins with a 6mm core of pure cotton rope sourced from Japan. It goes onto say that 'this is central to the cable as a means of creating a core that ismechanically damped. Around the core is a braid of 32 bare, pure copper strandsat 30 AWG each (summing to 15 AWG), then an interstitial layer of braidedmultifilament nylon, a secondary layer of 32 braided copper wires - same as theinterior layer of wire - and finally an overall braided jacket of nylon'. TheBlack Cat 3232 speaker cable comes standard terminated with XOX gold-plated purecopper bananas, with XOX Gold-Plated Brass Spade-Adapters available as anoption.
Digital And USB Cable
On their website Black Cat claims that their DIGIT-USBcable is designed differently than other manufacturer's cable. They call thearchitecture of others' 'ordinary and mundane', since they don't design theirswith 'twin 45-ohm highly precise micro-coaxial cables with real silver-platedcopper-foil shielding' instead of 'metallized plastic Mylar' for the data linesand run within a PTFE (Teflon) tube. Power and ground signals are run in aseparate layer in counter-rotating helices around the outer-diameter of theTeflon tube using Black Cat's Matrix-32 InterPole system, and then the overalljacket of the cable is woven around the whole form. The digital cable Black Catsent me for audition is their Digit 75 Mk. II, a 75 Ohm cable to connect my CDtransport to the digital-to-analog converter's coax input. Black Cat considersthis to be a 'lite' trickle down from their more expensive TRØN, which usessome of their QuieTex materials and techniques to create an RF and EM insulativeblanket in order to help defray the effects of RF/EM from without and within thecable. Black Cat considers it an electrically precise 75 Ohm coaxial cable withan outstanding bandwidth.
Re-Wire
Is my job is to install this cable into my system, and seeif I hear the same thing as Chris Sommovigo did? Of course! I also have manyyears' experience listening to different brands and models of interconnects inmy system. So, I will hear how these stack up to them, and what I also imagineto be the ideal cable, which is no cable at all. Back in the day, when I firstheard my system re-wired with 'high-end' cable, transparency seemed to be thegoal, and to be honest, that really never left. Of course, Chris Sommovigo ofBlack Cat isn't the first manufacturer to describe his cable as having thesetraits. To me, it all comes down to transparency, how easily the music signalpasses through the interconnect without mucking things up. The only problem isthat the only cables I've heard that can come close to this cost quite a bit. We'llsee how the Black Cat measures up.
When offered to review the Black Cat cable, andagain just before I was sent enough of their interconnect and speaker cable torewire my entire system, I warned Chris Sommovigo. I let him know that I justfinished a reviewof the very impressive Accusound's XD interconnect, Digital Link, and XDloudspeaker cables. These cables are on average seven to eight times theprice of the Black Cat cables that I was being offered to review. I told Christhat I was willing to try his brand of cables, as long as he didn't get tooupset if I said in my review that I wasn't blown away by the Black Cat cableswhen compared to the more expensive wires. He agreed. Power wizard 1.0 wiring diagram user manual. So, when the Black Catcables arrived, out came the older cables, and in went the Black Cat. I ran aone meter balanced interconnect between my reference PassLaboratories X350.5 power amplifier, and the preamplifier I wascurrently using, an extremely transparent, full-function MarkLevinson No 523 preamplifier.
Although, I wasn't using the fine phonopreamplifier in this component, instead using my PassLabs XP-15 phono preamp, snaking an unbalanced RCA interconnect betweenit and the Levinson. I didn't need to run a cable from my turntable set-up tothe phono preamp because my Tri-Planar 6 tonearm is hard-wired with its ownunbalanced RCA-terminated interconnect. It is now using an Urushi EtsuroBordeaux phono cartridge (review forthcoming) that in turn is mounted on a BasisDebut V turntable. I ran a 1.5-meter balanced interconnect between an EMM LabsDA2 digital-to-analog converter to an input on the preamp. I installed betweenthe power amp and a pair of SoundLab Majestic 545 full-range electrostatic speakers a four-meter pair of3202 speaker cables. The speaker's low-end was augmented with a pair of SVSSB16-Ultra 16' 1500-Watt subwoofers (review forthcoming) which have recentlyreplaced my Velodyne 15' 1250-Watt subs. I didn't bother requesting a four-meterpair of cables for the subs. Maybe next time.
