Chord C-jack

This is the cable that admits there is a phone in your system. Or a laptop, or a portable player, or the small brick of a DAC someone gave you at Christmas — a source with a 3.5mm socket on it, being asked to join a hi-fi that cost a hundred times as much, almost always through whatever black lead happened to be in the drawer. Those leads are made to a price that assumes nobody will ever listen critically through one, and mostly the assumption holds.

The Chord Company built the C-jack for people in whom it does not hold. Their brief for it was specific: something to match the growing number of affordable, genuinely good portable players, robust enough to be carried about, and priced so that buying one is not an act of faith.

ARAY, handed down from Sarum T

The C-jack uses ARAY conductor geometry, developed from the Tuned ARAY conductor configuration that first appeared on Chord's Sarum T range — the cables at the top of their catalogue, several tiers and a great deal of money above this one. What Chord publish about the mechanics of ARAY is sparse, and we will not fill the silence with physics they have not claimed. The confirmed part is the principle: the arrangement of the conductors inside the jacket is tuned to the particular job the cable does, rather than one layout being reused across a range.

Two configurations

Mini-jack to mini-jack, in 0.75m, 1m, 1.5m and 3m, for feeding a portable amplifier or a headphone chain. Mini-jack to two RCA plugs, in 0.75m, 1.5m and 3m, for the more common job of getting a portable source into a line input on a hi-fi amplifier. Chord list it as suitable for any line-level component — mobile phones, laptops, CD players, streaming devices and amplifiers. Work out which end goes where before ordering, since the two versions are not interchangeable.

Technical Specifications

The Chord Company do not publish conductor material, shielding or dielectric figures for the C-jack, so we have not listed any. Where a maker stays quiet, guessing on their behalf is how bad information gets into circulation.

Who Is It For?

Owners of a decent portable player or a laptop used as a source, and anyone whose second system runs off a phone through an analogue input. It is also the sensible cable for a car, a study, a workshop — places where a good lead earns its money by surviving being coiled and uncoiled twice a day rather than by revealing anything profound.

The limitation is straightforward and worth stating: what comes out of a 3.5mm socket has already been through that device's own analogue output stage, and on most phones and laptops that stage is the weakest link by a wide margin. No cable repairs it. Increasingly, of course, the socket is not there at all — plenty of phones no longer have one — so check before ordering. If your source has a coaxial digital output, the Chord C-Digital lets you bypass the internal analogue stage entirely, which is the better answer where it is available. The rest of the range is on our Chord Company collection page.

Buying from Martins Hi-Fi

Inexpensive cables are where a shop can be genuinely useful, because the difference between the right one and the nearly-right one is a wasted afternoon rather than a wasted fortune. Tell us what the source is, what it is going into and how far apart they sit, and we will tell you which configuration and length you need — including, sometimes, that you do not need this cable at all.

When you get in touch, you'll be speaking with Dave, Chris and Tim at info@martinshifi.co.uk, call 01603 627010, or WhatsApp on 07554 687137. You can read more about how we work on our Why Martins page. We are at 85–91 Ber Street, Norwich, NR1 3EY.