Taralabs cables

TARA (The Absolute Reference Audio) Labs is a manufacturer of a high-end audio cables from Medford, Oregon. It's led by president Merrill Bergs. The trademark of Tara Labs is their use of solid wire.


The company was established in 1984, when company founder Matthew Bond, trained in physics and electronics theory, was looking for ways to improve the performance of audio components and the wire used within an audio system. As early as the mid 1970s and early 1980s, Matthew Bond had experimented with solid core conductors of different diameters. He hypothesized that an 'optimum diameter' of 18 AWG (American Wire Gage) or 1 millimeter was ideal for audio frequencies because there was minimal high frequency attenuation caused by the principles known as skin effect.[1] It is important to note that Matthew Bond's work was corroborated by research work from the NBS or National Bureau of Standards in the 1930s and confirmed later by Stereophile Magazine in July 1988 in a table presented as the DC to AC resistance ratio versus frequency, in wires of different diameters.[2]Matthew Bond is credited with the invention of solid-core wires for audio use, because his work predates Dennis Morecroft (1984) and any of the early solid-core wires developed for use in audio in England at the time.[3]
The first commercial speaker cables were designed in 1984, the Phase II speaker cable, a solid coredesign.[4] Thirty years later, the Phase II Speaker Cable is still available through retailers in the United States. In 1990, TARA Labs introduced the world’s first cable to have a floating conductor unterminated at one end that would allow for an increased high-frequency bandwidth to be coupled to the signal carrying conductors (US patent No. 5033091). Later, a control device inside a box fitted to the cable (The Temporal Continuum) allowed the user to adjust the amount of high frequency energy to be heard.
TARA Labs introduced Rectangular Solid Core cables in 1992. The cables employed solid core conductors with a rectangular cross section. Rectangular Solid Core can be made in specific proportions(width and height), and this provides for the tuning of the frequency response of a conductor as compared to a round conductor of the same size or DC resistance.[5]
The cables employed solid core conductors with a rectangular cross section.[6][7] Both the Gen2 conductor and the smaller Gen3 conductor are said to be Eight-Nines™ pure copper, which is 99.999999% pure. TARA Labs’ trademarks for this technology are 8N™ and SA-OF8N®. SA-OF8N means Super Annealed – Oxygen Free 8 Nines copper. According to Bond, the term ‘annealing’ refers to the method whereby a conductor can be made softer and more conductive.[8]
In 1999 Tara Labs introduced the "Zero" interconnect with an Vacuum Dielectric Insulation system.[9][10]
In 2014, TARA Labs introduced a new line of high-end cables called The Evolution Series, which included cables such as: The Zero Evolution, The Omega Evolution, and The Grandmaster Evolution.[11][12]

Considering the amount of careful research, cautious theorizing and wild speculation that have been lavished on the amplifier power question, we should expect to be considerably closer to the answer in 1962 than we were five years ago. This does not seem to be the case.
We have instruments for measuring sound pressure levels in the air, for measuring electrical power, and for analyzing distortion content to the third decimal place, and the literature is full of learned dissertations on the structure of musical sounds, their behavior in concert halls and living rooms, and the relationships between ears and the sounds around them. Yet one audio expert still maintains that 0.5 watts of amplifier power is all you ever need, while another says 50 watts is barely enough. Who is right?

As is often the case in such a diagonal disputation, both are partly right. One source of the widespread disagreement stems from the lack of any standardized criteria for judging power requirements. Thus, one expert may be stating how much power we need to produce a certain volume of sound during crescendos, while the other may be telling us how powerful an amplifier we must have before any further increase in available power ceases to yield any perceptible improvement in sound. On the other hand, another expert—the field is thick with them—might be figuring power requirements on the basis of a high-efficiency speaker system like the Klipschorn, while yet another expert may have decided that the only speakers worth listening to are low-efficiency types like the AR-1, so he bases his estimate on its power requirements.
All are legitimate approaches, but it is obvious that no one of them can supply a universal answer. Hence the compounded confusion.
Let's get one thing straight at the outset: "Need" has no bearing on the matter. It is senseless to ask how much power we need, because the answer is "none." We don't need high fidelity, when it comes right down to that. Nobody would die, no governments would collapse, no panics would ensue if, all of a sudden, high fidelity had never been.

All right, then, how much power should we have? Simply stated, we should have enough power to reproduce the desired sound at the desired level without exceeding a certain limit of distortion. This reads like a masterpiece of evasion, but it is a step in the right direction, for no expert will disagree with it.
But what level is the "desired" level? Background music level, foreground listening level, or the kind of ear-shattering level that a conductor might hear from his podium?
The hi-fi system owner who does not plan to use his rig for anything except background music can just forget all about power requirements. At very low listening levels, the ear's powers of discrimination are poor, so any amplifier that is sold under the guise of high fidelity will do. A cheap 5-watter will be adequate, and it isn't too important if its distortion is fairly high, because nobody really listens attentively enough to background music to notice its sound.
The only time we benefit from high fidelity is when we concentrate on the program, because that is when we start to get finicky about the sound. Our ears are most responsive to upper frequencies when the sound is loud, and it is at high levels where a hi-fi rig's distortion is prone to be most severe. If the amplifier is clipping the tops off peaks at high listening volume, the resulting raggedness of sound is much more audible than it would be were the amplifier doing the same thing at a much lower volume level. This, of course, helps to befuddle the issue, because the higher the listening volume, the lower the amplifier's distortion must be in order to sound pleasant. And we all know that the harder we push an amplifier, the more distortion it generates.

So, for the purposes of this article, we are going to assume that you will, at least occasionally, play your system at foreground level.
What about orchestra-in-the-room level? Although a popular advertising gambit, this is an absurd notion. To be mundane about it, there simply isn't room for a symphony orchestra in the average home, so even if it were possible to re-create the original volume of the orchestra as heard from the conductor's podium—which it is, but it takes scads of power and a highly efficient speaker—the effect could not be realistic. It would also be very un-neighborly. A solo performer, or a chamber group, could be in your living room, and sounds very convincing when so reproduced. But recording engineers realized long ago that orchestra patrons listen from out in the hall rather than from the podium, so they do their microphoning to convey as well as possible the illusion of listening from a mythical "best seat in the house." Their recordings sound best when reproduced to scale; higher volume levels make them sound overblown and unnatural.
As sound waves travel away from their source, their total acoustical power remains essentially the same, but as each wave spreads out over a wider area, it thins itself out. Thus, the actual intensity of a sound some distance from its source will be considerably lower than its intensity right at the source. For this reason, we measure sound intensities in a concert hall in terms of variations in air pressure (or the sound pressure), rather than in terms of watts of acoustical power. The original power at the source can then be computed, if desired, by a simple formula based on the fact that sound pressure weakens by a square root function as its distance from the source is doubled.