Chord ChordMusic USB

This cable exists because of music servers. The Chord Company have said as much: it came about while they were exploring audiophile hard-drive devices — Innuos and Melco among them — with RJ45 and USB outputs on the back. That is a fairly recent problem for a cable company. For most of the history of hi-fi, nobody had to think about a connector designed in the mid-1990s for printers and scanners, and nobody had to think about what happens when that connector is asked to sit between a computer and a digital-to-analogue converter.

What makes USB awkward is that it is not one cable. Inside the sheath there is a twisted signal pair carrying data in both directions, and alongside it a 5-volt bus power line drawn straight from a computing device — a switch-mode supply, a processor, a solid-state drive, all of it busy. Run those together for a metre and the power conductors are perfectly placed to couple noise into the signal pair, and into the DAC at the far end. Almost every serious USB audio cable is an answer to that geometry, and Chord's answer is layers.

Three layers, and what each one is doing

The Chord Company build ChordMusic USB with an acoustic-damping braid on the twisted plus and minus signal conductors, a further layer covering all of the conductors, and an external shield beneath the braided outer jacket. So the signal pair gets its own treatment first, everything gets a second wrap, and the whole assembly sits inside a shield. Chord describe the cable as using their SuperARAY technology.

The connectors are ChorAlloy® plated USB A and B types, with the conductors soldered rather than crimped. Soldering a USB connector by hand is slower and needs more skill than the crimped assembly used on the vast majority of USB leads, and it removes a mechanical joint from a signal path that is already carrying a high-frequency differential signal through a plug body designed for cost.

Technical Specifications

Who Is It For?

Owners of a music server or streamer feeding a DAC over USB, at the point where the boxes either side are good enough to be limited by what sits between them. That is the honest test. ChordMusic sits at the top of The Chord Company's range and it should be judged against the alternative of spending the same money on the source itself — a question we are happy to argue either way depending on what you already own.

Two practical points. If your server sends audio to the streamer over ethernet rather than USB, this is the wrong cable for the link that matters; the Chord ChordMusic Streaming Cable covers that connection. And a shorter run of Chord's USB cables further down the range — the Chord Epic USB digital audio interconnect or the Chord Shawline USB — will tell you fairly quickly whether your system responds to this kind of change at all. The full range is on our Chord Company collection page.

Buying from Martins Hi-Fi

We hosted the first UK Innuos Nazaré event, which is to say we have spent a fair amount of time with exactly the class of device this cable was developed around, and we are comfortable talking about where a USB lead sits in the list of things worth changing on a server-based system. Sometimes it is near the top. Sometimes the power supply or the ethernet side of the network is the better first move, and we would rather tell you that.

A USB cable can be substituted in a few seconds without unsettling anything else, so it is one of the more straightforward things to judge in your own room. Our home evaluation service covers it. 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.