Tweaked metallurgy makes the Chord Company RumourX cable even better
Speaker cable | £20/m | whf.cm/RumourX22
We admit that the change of plating on a set of banana plugs isn’t particularly glamorous. But take a listen to a 2022 sample of Chord Company’s Award-winning RumourX speaker cable using the new ChorAlloy-plated banana plugs and it’s hard to do anything but nod in appreciation.
It’s not that RumourX wasn’t already a great speaker cable. It has been our go-to premium recommendation for a number of years now, and rightly so. On paper, its twisted-pair construction to improve electrical interference rejection is hardly unusual, and the use of relatively thin and stiff 6mm conductors – silver plated copper – isn’t massively impressive. But there is a reason that the Rumour has been part of Chord’s line-up for decades.
It was introduced in 1996 and was just the second speaker cable the company had made. Rumour was a success from the beginning and has been developed sparingly over the years. The addition of a soft outer sheath over the twin conductors and a change of dielectric from PTFE (Teflon) to Chord’s now favoured XLPE (cross-linked polyethylene) in late 2018 being the most notable revisions.
Shiny new plating
It is fair to say that in comparison, the change of plug coating from silver plating to ChorAlloy – the company is sketchy on details, calling it a multi-metal material – seems pretty minor. The new plating looks shinier, almost chrome-like in comparison to the previous silver alternative. Chord says it gives improved connection quality with greater resistance to tarnishing over time. The result is claimed to be a more musical sound.
Of course, cables are passive components that only carry the sound between components in your system. They can’t actively make the sound better, so the best cable is the one that degrades the signal the least. We try the RumourX in a number of systems from our reference set-up of Naim ND555/555 PS DR music streamer, Burmester 088/911 Mk3 amplifier and ATC SCM50 speakers, to a more price-compatible pairing of Naim Supernait 3 and KEF’s LS50 Metas.
Tauter bass performance
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