I am extremely offended to have my six hours of meticulous handcrafted labor belittled by any claim that it should take only 1/12 that amount of time. I'm also offended by any further claims that we are using anything less than the best possible materials for our high performance power cords. Okay, had to get that out.
I am so dedicated to providing the best quality-value products to my customers that we delayed marketing our #555 cable design for 8 months until the WattGate IEC plugs were available. We tried the other brands of IEC's and in my opinion none of them were up to my standards for coming out with a new Granite Audio product. I got test samples of the WattGate from Ray Kimber after meeting with him in person and seeing how well engineered these plugs are. We had test samples even before they were UL approved. We waited for the UL approval because I would not sell a cable with non-UL Approved parts. We had plugs from the first WattGate production run. They were much more expensive at first because Ray had to recover his tooling costs. The price dropped on later runs and we reduced our cord prices too.
Now, please allow me to respond to specific questions/allegations.
1. Our cord is expensive and very flexible compared to other's. It is very high-purity copper with 123- 30AWG strands in the #555 and 312- 30AWG strands in the #560 which is 10AWG total. It is UL Approved, CSA Certified, MSHA Approved, and rated to 600 volts. All those approvals cost money and I insist on having them for my customer's safety. Many of the high-end cords by other makers do not have any of these approvals and they compromise the customer's safety and their homeowner's insurance liability. Anyone who defeats the ground on our cable is compromising everyone's safety and risking serious electrical shock and a fire that their insurance may not cover. Please don't modify our cables in any way.
We do not use silver-plated copper with PTFE insulation for many good reasons. First of all I, and everyone I know who has compared it, think it has inferior sonics in Granite Audio products when compared to other materials. We've tested it in our speakers internal wiring, speaker cables, interconnect cables, power cords, and internal component wiring with unfavorable results. All of our customers who have compared our #555 and #560 cables to the silver-plated PTFE cords in their own systems have preferred our cord. Everyone has their own preferences and I am sure that many people like the sound of the PTFE cords, but I don't. Silver is a better conductor than copper and frequencies that travel in the silver will be louder. Since the high frequencies tend to travel on the silver surface due to the skin-effect, they will be louder. This may explain why many people think that PTFE cords sound too bright. This can be a real problem in power cords especially where you are trying to block the high-frequency RFI/EMI noise from getting into your component. Silver plating the wire only helps the transmission of these frequencies when that's the last thing you want to do.
PTFE is stiff. It make the cord stiff, especially in 10AWG. It makes it very difficult to install the cord and keep it connected at both ends. Several times we used a $1,000.00 PTFE cord at meetings of the Arizona Audiophile Society and always had to bring a collection of boxes and risers to support the cord and keep it from falling out of the wall socket and out of the component IEC. PTFE is corrosive to copper. That is why the copper is silver plated to protect it from the PTFE. At the end of the wire where it is stripped there can be a loss of integrity of the silver coating and the bare copper can become vulnerable to corrosion. I want my products to be maintenance free to the extent possible and to sound as good 50 years from now as they do today. With all due respect to the many people who like silver-plated PTFE, It's just not up to my standards.
2. Yes, we lose money on the #555 cable. It is a promotional loss-leader. The sonics of the #555 are so great that we more than recover the loss when our good #555 customers discover our quality and buy our other products. Also, the #555 makes our components sound so good that I want to make sure the cost doesn't keep any of our component customers from buying them and getting the maximum performance from us.
3. Our proprietary toroids should not be confused with ferrites. The toroids are much more expensive, much larger, and much more effective for audio applications. Our toroids are self-shielding due to their shape, while ferrites are not. This allows us to put the toroids at the ends of the cord where they are so much more effective than ferrites in the middle of the cord. Also, our toroids have a much higher saturation tolerance than ferrite which is critical on high power components like our tube power amps. And last of all, our toroids filter down to 1 MHz where the average ferrite is only filtering down to 40 MHz. 40 MHz is helpful on ham radios, but of limited benefit in audio.
4. This comment is so absurd and offensive to me that I'm not responding to it.
Cheap conductor? You loved our performance enough to attempt to copy our design?
Part of the high-performance of all our cables comes from the meticulous handcrafting and the extreme care we take in the terminations. I've spent many years learning my craft and I can't tell you how much I enjoy music or how rewarding it is for me to be able to make a living building products that help others enjoy their favorite music more too.
I extend my many sincere thanks to everyone who has tried a Granite Audio product. I've been enriched by it and I hope you have too.
Sincerely, Don Hoglund, President Granite Audio.
