HANDCRAFTED IN FLORIDA, USA
OPERA
Arctic's Palladium Flagship cable
We are proud to introduce the new Opera series with thicker palladium plating and improved Litz construction!
The most technologically advanced headphone cable on the market.
Specifications:
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26AWG 8-wire configuration
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Cutting-Edge Single-Crystal 7N OCC Pure Silver + Pure Palladium Plated
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Type-6 Litz Geometry Pure Cotton Center Core Per Conductor
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Cryogenically & Enamelled Treated
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Custom Ultra-Soft And Flexible TPU Insulation
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Mundorf Supreme Silver solder
YOU HAVE REACHED THE TOP!
We've been testing, comparing, and experimenting behind the scenes for over four months now, trying different custom design wire samples with only one purpose in mind:
We wanted to create the next-generation silver headphone cable that would outperform all of the high-end silver cables we've heard to date and substantially. Only then could we justify the significant price difference from our Signum+ series.
Since we spared no expense on our silver Signum cable, we knew that the only way to achieve that would be to implement a new kind of metal with our ultimate ultra-pure silver cable.
Some of the samples we've tried sounded great, but we considered them more like a side grade when each provided slightly different sonic characteristics. It wasn't the result we were looking for.
We then decided to try a slightly different approach, and we changed the wire construction that we use on the Signum wire; by platting the silver wire with a thick layer of palladium, we finally hit the jackpot.
We've tested the cable using many different headphones; Focal Utopia, Hifiman HE1000V2, Meze Empyrean, Sennheiser HD800, Sony Z1R, Fostex TH-900, Beyerdynamic T1 2nd gen, and Audeze LCD-4z.
Right off the bat, transparency and clarity were like never before. It was as if the cable was no longer a part of the chain. Each of the headphones seemed to scale up to their absolute maximum potential. The cable could easily keep up during the busiest passages while pinpointing every instrument placement in the recording with a solid black background.
Bass texture, resolution, and extension were the best we've heard with these headphones that we know so well; soundstage width and depth were increased, and had a sense of an enormous atmospheric 3d sound while instruments were still spot-on accurate. Vocals sounded organic and crisp, and the highs were well-extended and highly detailed without sounding harsh.
The only downside was the cost; since palladium is about 100 times more expensive than silver and currently even more costly than gold, we had to adjust the price accordingly. Still, just like the Signum series, our profit margin on these complex cables is significantly lower than average.
WHY PALLADIUM?
It isn't a secret that silver stands at the top as the best conductive metal of all known metals and by a large margin.
That is why the main component in our fusion/plated cables will always be the purist OCC silver available for production.
Our ultra-pure 7N OCC silver offers incredible transparency and neutrality, allowing it to be the perfect canvas for combining new metals
with different technical properties, enabling us to unlock new and extraordinary sound qualities while maintaining the best possible conductivity.
Pure palladium-plated silver offers a new standard in sound quality.
TRUST YOUR EARS:
Some claim that silver is scientifically the only way to go but neglect to mention that scientifically, even a low-grade OFC copper wire will have near identical/identical frequency response in measurements as the purest and most conductive silver wire.
However, the audible difference is so apparent that there isn't any room for doubt. There are many sound qualities measurements can't identify, such as base texture, imaging/instrument separation, sound stage's width and depth, detail extraction, resolution, and much more.
Sticking with the basics is always the simplest approach; exploring new and different ways is much more challenging and costly.
Some claims also come with hidden agendas; therefore, we strongly suggest ignoring them and always trust your ears or the personal experience of your fellow audiophile friends on the audio forums and professional reviewers.
WHY SO EXPENSIVE?
Simply because palladium costs over $80 per gram. In an 8-wire litz construction, there are eight individual wires; each is coated with a thick palladium layer. Every added gram could increase the production cost by hundreds of dollars.
If fact, this cable is so expensive to produce, and our profit margin is so low despite its high cost, we mostly see it as a statement that we were able to create one of the most complex and best sounding cables money can buy.
UP-OCC TECHNOLOGY (2016 article)
The unidirectional UP-OCC has low electric resistance and practically no crystal boundaries. Accordingly, it can transmit electrical signals faster
and with less distortion than ordinary OFC and silver wires. These features make the pure OCC copper and silver the state-of-the art conductor materials for the audiophile cable industry.
WHAT IS UP-OCC?
UP-OCC stands for Ultra-Pure, Ohno Continuous Casting.
The UP-OCC process for refining copper and silver was developed and patented by Professor Ohno of the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan.
The license to use this manufacturing process is incredibly popular for the production of wire and cable products for the audio/video industry.
In conventional processing, hot molten copper/silver is poured into a cooled mold for extrusion, resulting in multiple, fractionated crystal structure.
While the copper/silver may be "pure" in the sense of mensuring gas impurities in the copper/silver in comparison to standard copper/silver refining techniques, Oxygen-Free Copper (OFC) has undesirable effects that lead many to use more expensive materials such as silver for their conductive strands.
As developed for A/V cable use, the OCC process utilizes a heated mold for casting and extruding. With cooling taking place in a separate process, the result is a larger crystal size and increased purity that approaches the 6N, 99.9998%!
In another way, traditional copper/silver has oxygen impurities of 200 to 500 parts per million (PPM), while conventional OFC copper/silver reduces to less than 10 PPM. With the OCC process, the figure is cut in half to less than 5 PPM of oxygen and less than 0.25 PPM of hydrogen (compared to 0.5 PPM for OFC).
With these results, the OCC process creates "ultra-pure" copper and silver.
THE BENEFITS OF UP-OCC
• An accurate unidirectional copper and silver crystal that is as free from impurities as possible to prevent corrosion
• Flexibility and fatigue resistance without impairing conductive characteristics
• Low electrical resistance
• Rapid signal transmission
• Corrosive-resistant
• Non-crystal boundaries
Packaging
