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Despite ongoing experiments, their solid-core silver conductors remained a constant. And our men from Hannover categorically refute the material’s rep for lit-up high frequencies. As they put it, it’s one of those many urban hifi myths unless it involves silver plating or improperly designed cable. It’s actually common knowledge that silver’s resistivity (its ohmic impedance for a meter length of 1mm² diameter) is lower than copper and significantly lower than gold. Fundamentally then silver has the best conductivity. Their solid-core concept is founded on the notion that stranded conductors add inter-strand contact resistance to cause time delays at high frequencies, become prone to distortion and susceptible to microphonics. German Highend address the latter with a very tough dielectric.

Such a no-compromise stance obviously comes at a price given that their silver is 4N or at least 99.995% pure. This purity is measured relative to inclusions of mostly copper which can amount to 50-80mg per kilogram of silver. But handling of their cable too comes at a price. With solid-core wires, tight turns can more easily lead to kinks than they would with very thin stranded equivalents.


A careless quickie rewire behind the rack or running an unduly sharp corner en route to a desired connector here entails certain risks. Whilst the German Highend leashes aren’t exactly raw eggs, your sound can end up with a bit of egg on its face should you cause a permanent kink. In short, you wouldn’t want to step on this stuff. Admittedly this could leave certain living circumstances and speaker placements out.

Production of German Highend’s raw silver conductors—they also make interconnects, not just speaker cables—is in the hands of an Austrian specialty firm though Jörg Erwin was quick to stress that this production process incorporates their own ideas. The same is true for parts of the tooling and equipment which heat, draw and polish the wire. Clearly defined and controlled heating and cooling processes have a direct impact on the optimal crystal lattice i.e. the ‘growing’ or lengthening of molecular junctions which impact material properties. Heating is by electronic induction, cooling by nitrogen.

The dielectric extrusion of the Austrian conductors occurs in-house in Hannover. So does application of the protective outer sleeving, the final terminating and high-voltage break-in. One exception is the interconnect. Its dielectric is applied by Nürnberg firm Leoni, albeit again "with our own extrusion gear" as Jörg Erwin assures us. As though for a boutique maker like German Highend that weren’t freaky enough, even seemingly little things like hollow bananas and spades get the same bespoke treatment. The raw material is "a sonically state-of-the-art type hardened pure silver" again from Austria which is worked into the final shape... guess what, in-house again. Talk about control freaks.