Interview: Chord Company’s Rob Noble

UK’s cable maker

By Michael Jones

November 2004

Rob Noble – sales manager for The Chord Company, a specialist cable manufacturer based in Wiltshire, England – was in New Zealand recently visiting the Chord Company distributor and local retailers. Carrying my tape recorder and digital camera, I caught up with Rob Noble. My first question was about Chord Company’s origins.

Chord has been around for 18 years. It was originally founded by Sally Kennedy to provide cables to meet a specific order. There was no one else making cables of this specific type at the time. The company has grown from a kitchen table operation to the point where it now employs a dozen people full time and the same part time. The designer, Nigel Finn, has been there for 18 years.

We design all of our own cables. The view we take is that we’re a product led company, rather than a marketing led company. It’s important to us to retain control over the products.

We don’t take the approach of a lot of other companies, whereby they go to the Far East to buy what they can at a certain price in order to hit price points around the world. We decide what sort of product we need and want, Nigel will design it and if it happens to cost £110, rather than the more convenient £100, then we’ll do that because it’s worth doing.

We retain control all the way through. We have prototypes made up. We blind test everything before we launch it. We take product out to some of our dealers to try it out and only once we’re happy with the design do we go through with it.

AudioEnz: You don’t have a cable manufacturing plant in the back yard…?

Rob Noble: No, that’s a substantial undertaking! We have a number of companies we use to make the product for us, mainly based in Europe. We try and keep things closer to home.

The cables are hand assembled. Nearly all the cables are made up on site or by our outworkers. Everything is made by us and tested before it goes out.

AudioEnz: Take me through the process of a new cable, from the initial idea through to finished product for sale.

Rob Noble: We aim for a system synergy, and by that we mean a constancy of sound throughout the range. If a customer of ours starts off with a Calypso – the introductory interconnect – and comes back for a higher level cable, there needs to be a recognisable Chord sound to it. We don’t actually colour the sound, we try and get something that replicates the music back properly. That needs to be reflected throughout the range.

The basic three interconnects are copper cables with a polyethylene dielectric. We won’t use PVC because it muddies the sound. Once you go to the Siren and beyond, we use silver-coated copper and Teflon.

We pay a lot of attention to screening, as there is so much rubbish flying around the atmosphere with the likes of switch mode power supplies and the electronics in homes.

I was around at Chris Murphy’s home the other night [Chris is the Chord, Naim and Rega importer] listening to records on his turntable. He turned off a load of stuff – satellite receiver and other stuff – and his system came to life, it was a remarkable change.

AudioEnz: Chord Company cables are marked with an arrow, so that they should be used only in one direction. Tell me about directionality.

Directionality seems to exist in practise, but would be a hard one to pinpoint in theory. We just know, as a lot of cable manufacturers do, that cables can sound different in different directions.

AudioEnz: Compared to some manufacturers, Chord Company cables have tended to be in the lower to middle price area. Is that part of the UK hi-fi scene of trying to build products cheaper?

Rob Noble: No, not at all. That’s just where it started. Now we have products at all levels of prices. The Signature interconnect and speaker cable retails [in New Zealand] for just short of $3000.

We’ve progressed from the budget end over time. Its taken 16 years to get to the Signature interconnect. It wasn’t rushed into. Instead it was a case of when the product is right we’ll launch it.

We do enjoy a really good relationship with many hi-fi manufacturers. If you go to hi-fi shows you’ll find our product in a lot of rooms. For me, that reflects well on our cables. If the manufacturers feel that their kit sounds good with our cables then we must be doing something right.

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