[Antipodes]

Audiophilia kindly awarded our Komako Interconnects a Star Component Award.

Check out the review here  http://www.audiophilia.com/wp/?p=4718#more-4718

"The Komako’s levels of transparency and sheer resolution are simply astonishing,... More than just supremely resolved, they also endow music with gloriously authentic colours and textures, presenting a delightfully nuanced view of the subtlety and complexity of live sound and its harmonic structure...  it offers an exhilarating level of performance that surely places it amongst the world’s finest"

Our interconnects employ a unique cable geometry, that we have perfected over the last six years, that results in a huge improvement in phase accuracy over commonly used geometries.  This pays off in all areas of sound performance, the most obvious of which is a remarkable natural liveliness.  Andy has done a great job of describing how this breakthrough technology sounds.

Mark

[Toon]

Congratulations Mark! Hopefully this will help to get the word out. Antipodes have started with a blank sheet of paper, and come up with a unique solution to connecting audio components. Every enthusiast, cable believer or sceptic, should take the time to look into these.

[Antipodes]

Congratulations Mark! Hopefully this will help to get the word out. Antipodes have started with a blank sheet of paper, and come up with a unique solution to connecting audio components. Every enthusiast, cable believer or sceptic, should take the time to look into these.

Thanks Toon.  The interconnect design took 4 years, the digital interconnects took 2 years, and I am still going on speaker cable designs.  I am torn between not wanting to release speaker cables till I have a genuine breakthrough, and demands from my customers that want me to sell them a speaker cable to go with their interconnects.  So far resisting the temptation to put out a 'me too' speaker cable product.

[Audioclyde]

I have one of Mark's digi cable's feeding the bnc input of my DAC (from the output of my John Keny box modded, battery pwr'ed HiFace), and I really love the musicality the cable brought to my system.

Thumbs up and congrats!

Randy

[Toon]

I've just spotted (there's been a recent website update) that the latest version of the Komako is a lot less moolah (XLR version reduced from $900 to $550), and claimed to sound better too. These things have just put a bomb under the $500 cable market, that's for sure. One owner switched to them from Stealth Indras, and I'm betting he won't be the last. All credit to Mark for doing the right thing and passing on the savings .... despite the fact that these must have been among the best value cables on the market at the old price. 

[Antipodes]

Yes, the new Komako is now at the price point we have been striving for.  A couple of years ago we had what we and many customers believe is a candidate for the best interconnect available at any price, the Reference.  But we decided that the next thing to do was to bring the cost down, and rather than pushing the Reference, we have 'hid our light under a bushel' a bit while doing that.  We believe that with the Komako we are bringing to market a cable that can compete with any cable at any price, for just $550, and we are very proud of that achievement and want to start telling people about it.  The Reference still has the edge, but the gap is now only 5-10%.

But Toon, the fact that we manufacture everything from raw materials is the main reason we can get prices down - we only seek an industry standard manufacturer's margin at the low end of the scale, and cut out all the suppliers' margins.  For example, while most cable companies are paying through the nose for their wire we buy gold, silver and platinum at commodity prices.

The prices listed on our website actually include allowance for standard distributor and retailer markups (without taxes), as we are looking for retail distribution and realise that retailers don't want to see us discounting from their RRP on our website.

[Toon]

Thanks for the insight, Mark. If it saves you money creating your own wire from raw ingots of gold and silver, compared to paying $1/foot for off-the-spool silver wire from China, then you can't be factoring in your time ... and electricity must be free in New Zealand?!  More power to you, though - the high end cable market could do with more of this cost-plus pricing. 

[Big Red Machine]

You've got my attention with your engineering and reasonable pricing.  Which connection would you recommend starting with: dac to pre or pre to amps if I wanted to get a feel for performance?

[Antipodes]

I am sure you would get that feel of liveliness everyone hears in our cables in either position.  The geometry we use means the interconnects will sound the same interfacing almost any set of components, so the answer to your question is really about which of the two is working the less well at the moment.  If the DAC has valves then maybe the DAC to Pre might benefit the most.  If not, and the amp is solid state then maybe the Pre to Power will benefit the most.  If not that either then I would go back to suggesting DAC to Pre.

To elaborate a little.  The conventional electrical theory is to try an minimise inductance, capacitance and resistance, and yet you will notice that most of the better sounding interconnects let inductance rise a little.  The downside of this is that the cable can become an antenna for noise.  This leads cable designers to moderate characteristic impedance (by not letting inductance rise as much as they would like), but we believe that this creates phase problems depending on the output impedance of the upstream component (mainly), making the sound a bit of a lottery depending on the components being connected.  This, for example, is why braided cables can be very system dependent and have poor soundstage performance.  We are able to set characteristic impedance to a safer/higher level without any attendant noise issues - in fact with extremely low noise.  This is the neat trick of our geometry.  While this flies in the face of what electrical engineers are taught, there is sound science behind our approach.  Where we differ is that we believe certain issues that are assumed away as inaudible at audio frequencies are in fact audible because of the sensitivity the ear/brain has to phase errors.  The proof, as they say, is 'in the pudding'.  The more phase coherent your system and music is, the more you will hear the difference, but everyone hears the natural, unforced liveliness of the design.

On the point raised by Toon about pricing.  We can make a stellar USD3,000 cable, but that doesn't really turn us on.  We are trying to get a cable to market that is within a few percentage points of the best cables available at any price, for around the USD500 price point.  With our latest Komako we believe we are there or thereabouts now.  That is what turns us on, and with the success of the Komako we will be spending a lot more time on getting our speaker cables to market in the next couple of months.  And anyway Toon, we are hoping to make up for our low margins with quantity someday soon 

[Big Red Machine]

Tubed dac right now to a tubed pre on order!  That can take a 1 meter cable.

The pre to amp is about 3 meters and then the farthest speaker is another 3.5 meters.  It sounds as if SE cables are just as viable as XLR cables.

Are the SE 1 meters ready to order now?

[Antipodes]

Yes, for sure, we have good stock of 1m RCA Komakos and have our first run of XLR Komakos ready in about a week.  As with all of our direct sales we offer 30 day money back if you don't like them.  Since early this year when we tweaked the leading edge speed of the old Komako we have had zero returns.