Chord Sarum T Analogue RCA

The phono plug is the oldest object in your system. RCA drew it up in the 1930s to join a pickup to an amplifier chassis inside the same wooden cabinet, and the industry has never managed to retire it. It is unbalanced, it does not lock, and the earth path is a springy sleeve doing its best. Every cable company above a certain price has to work around that inheritance, and the way they choose to do it tells you what they actually believe matters.

The Chord Company, who have been building cables by hand in Amesbury since 1985, treat the plug on the Sarum T Analogue RCA as part of the cable rather than a fitting screwed onto the end of it. The contact areas are ChorAlloy® plated and the plug surrounds are high-performance PTFE. The run itself uses Super ARAY conductor geometry with Taylon® insulation. In Chord's own hierarchy, Sarum T sits second only to the flagship ChordMusic range.

One point worth making early, because it catches people out: The Chord Company of Wiltshire make cables. Chord Electronics is a separate British company that makes DACs and amplifiers. Two different firms, similar name, no connection between them. This page is about the cable.

Taylon and the case against PTFE

Insulation is not inert. The dielectric wrapped around a conductor stores and releases a little energy as the signal swings, and how faithfully it lets go of what it stored is the whole argument. PTFE has been the high-end default for decades. Taylon® is Chord's replacement for it, and their claim for it is specific rather than vague — phase stability, which is to say the timing relationships between frequencies surviving the journey intact. Note that the argument is about the dielectric wrapped around the conductor, not about PTFE as a material in general: it still does the mechanical job in the plug surrounds of this cable, where its job is to hold the contact rigidly in place rather than to sit in the signal's electrical field.

Taylon® is what separates the Sarum T generation from the Sarum Super ARAY cables that came before it, which used a PTFE dielectric. If you already own earlier Sarum interconnects, this is the change you are being asked to pay for.

Super ARAY conductor geometry

ARAY was born in the Sarum range — Chord developed Tuned and Super ARAY conductor geometry on that cable, and it has shaped everything they have made since. The principle is that the physical arrangement of the conductors inside the jacket is tuned to the particular job the cable does, rather than one layout being shared across a catalogue.

We will be straight about the limits of what is published here. Chord say very little in public about the mechanics of ARAY, and we are not going to fill that silence with invented physics. What is confirmed is that the geometry is specific to the application, and that the Sarum T Analogue RCA carries the Super ARAY version.

Technical Specifications

Who Is It For?

Someone with a resolving system and a single-ended source — a phono stage, a DAC, a CD player — who has already sorted the components and is looking at what sits between them. This is a serious amount of money for a metre of wire, and it belongs in a system where the components themselves are not the limiting factor. In a modest setup the money is better spent elsewhere, and we will say so.

If your electronics offer balanced outputs and you have a run of any length, look at the Sarum T Analogue XLR instead. If it is a digital link you need, the Sarum T Digital Super Aray 1RCA to 1RCA is the coaxial equivalent. The rest of the range is on our Chord Company collection page.

Buying from Martins Hi-Fi

Cable at this level should not be bought on faith, and it does not have to be — if you would like to hear a Sarum T Analogue RCA in your own system before deciding, ask, and it can go out under our home evaluation service on the terms set out there. Custom lengths and alternative terminations are made to order, so tell us the run you actually need rather than buying a metre and coiling the spare behind the rack.

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.