hello everyone this is Amir from audio science review
uh we're back to uh reviewing a controversial uh product uh premium uh speaker cable
uh it's from a company called morrow sp3 about the model number is sp3 company's name is Morrow Audio
and the version i have is this uh cable as you can see also in the review it's an eight foot cable
uh it's in the by wire configuration so you got one pair at the amplifier end and then
you can split it and drive the tweeter and the woofer with two separate wires um the cable itself
is actually quite flexible is i don't know what's inside this uh um we woven uh jacket but whatever
it is is much more flexible than typical high-end speaker cables they tend to be stiff like these
are but what's in here is is soft and from that point of view it also doesn't weigh a ton
uh on that which i appreciate it seems like a lot of the high-end companies want to sell by weight
and dimensions and they make these garden hose speaker cables hoping that the customers
are swayed by that as uh premium cables go this is actually quite reasonable in price
it's 149 for the base cable and then you can specify what connectors and uh whether
you want to buy wire or not if you add all that up is 187 dollars but they seem to have a sale
of 38 percent right now which gets it back down to 145 or so so in grand scheme of things this is not
expensive uh if you were to sit at home and make cables for somebody uh for 150 dollars there's a
lot of work involved in in mucking with this thing so i think it's a very tedious job and
you'd be lucky to make a lot more than minimum wage so um they must make their money from their
cables from higher up in the line at the rate i like the quality of the connectors at the end
they made it quite well and and tight without being exceedingly uh stiff
into both my measurement system and also real amplifier and speakers that i connected it to
excuse me um typical of cable company uh marketing material if you look up uh what they say is the
proprietary technology uh it says removes major distortion that's common in most other
cable designs of course uh they never show any measurements of their cable or any other one so
uh it's up to us now to go and evaluate that so the easiest way for me to test the cable and
nothing but the cable is to hook it up directly to my audio precision analyzer my audio precision
analyzer has a set of banana jacks uh they're used for differential uh measurements so you could just
hook them up and then use them use whatever wire you want and so it made it quite nicely to these
cables it has it both for input and output the drawback is that the output impedance is 40 ohms
and the input speed impedance by default is 200 kilo ohms um typical amplifier has an output in
b impedance well under was one ohm and your speakers are you know could be anywhere from
four ohm to 40 50 ohms so from that point of view it is not a one-to-one replication of
how a speaker cable would be used in a sense i'm testing the speaker cable as if it's interconnect
which is a more stringent test because now noise and things like that can get into the cable and
it's at eight foot length with no shielding it could potentially upset the measurements
so there's some pros and cons in this testing but i'll address this when we get closer to the end
so i went ahead and connected the input to output my audio precision analyzer is
is quite capable so i can dial up the output to 20 volts so simulating an amplifier producing
probably around 50 watts or so into 8 ohms and when i do that it's basically there's
nothing there to see in that the cyanide is 122 db which is world-class for dax amplifiers can't
get this close and and this basically what it's doing is showing the the as good as the
analyzer itself can measure itself so the wire when i i can bypass it and analyze it where
internal short occurs with the relay the two were the same so this wire had the same performance for
good or bad that was you know the same as what the little internal connection is into the
analyzer you see two channels in here by the way because i went from one input to two
uh one output to two inputs because it's by wire and we're measuring both
and we see that it makes no difference that the uh that the outputs are separated as it should be
uh on this thing now the key is is how well uh you know this cable does compare to uh you know
generic cable and for generic cable uh excuse me let me uh dig it up uh in here i forgot to
find it before the review and it has ah here we go i was gonna say it has disappeared on me but uh
i found it i grabbed some really old uh zip cord speaker cable i have uh this is probably 30 to
40 year old cable i don't throw away stuff like this as long as it's not rotting and i
reached in my attic and i found this this cables and it wasn't terminated and i've run out of
you know banana plugs and just grab whatever i could a couple of these
uh really semi nasty uh banana ones Chinese ones from amazon and a couple of better quality ones
uh on this thing so they're just terminated not even the same at each end and the
wire is roughly the same length as the other one about eight foot or so
uh you can see it's kind of gnarly and and stiff and uh it's thin gauge is quite stiff
compared to the other cable and so let's see how bad this one is uh compared to uh our
premium cable that we just test this is probably by the way five dollars worth of material if that
we see that now there's only one channel here because i'm just going from one one input to
one output uh around this is slightly different time so the exact number is a little bit different
uh you know analyzer is not perfect and depending on time and temperature it it varies just a bit
but we can see the sign at is 121.6 db and it was 121.6 db before uh the distortion is that
in minus 150 decibels and before was maybe 145 with the other cable but again these are just
run to run variations it shows that the crusty old 30 40 year old cable is able to pass through
this 20 volt signal with just vanishingly small distortion noise uh our threshold of hearing for
anything any tone any sounds about 115 100 minus 115 here and we can see that we
were able to with both of these cables far exceed a threshold of hearing for a human
next thing i did was that i ran a frequency response test and not just
an ordinary frequency response that stops at 20 kilohertz but i've actually gone to 200 killers
again my audio precision analyzer is quite capable and is able to measure way past the audible band
so you can see this this thing it just looks very very flat there's a little bit of wiggle in
it but look at this scale the scale vertically is only one db up one db down typically when i run a
frequency response test this is minus five and the other on the other side is plus five i've zoomed
way in ten to one and you still can't see any variation the 200 killers between the
this uh sp3 morrow audio sp3 cable and my generic crusty 5 cable and uh but again this is you know
treating it like an interconnect and there may be some effects when the impedance has changed
but uh uh here by the way we're sweeping at all frequencies from 10 hertz all the way up
to 200 kilos so it's not a one tone and we're measuring all frequencies we're measuring ultra
ultra uh sonic frequencies what this tells us is that the tonality can't change because tonality
is determined by frequency response and that's not changing so somebody says it's louder or i
hear more bass and more mids or whatever that's just not true yeah the level hasn't changed and
the tonality has not changed now back to people making excuses for these things they say well
sine wave is you know this simple thing they think it's a static signal but it's actually
not a static signal a sine wave goes up and down from minus you know 27 volts peak to peak
or so whatever that comes out to be and uh it's certainly not one number and one voltage so we're
actually running through a full set of voltages so there's nothing static about a sine wave on that
but hey we can make more complex waveforms and here i've taken our standard multi-tone test which
is 32 tones all with different phases combined and if you look at that in the time domain
as i've shown in other videos is quite random and complex you would think it's music indeed if you
uh play this it sounds like an organ uh playing it feels like it sounds like many of the notes
you know your organ where you put your hand down on many keys at once and that's what it sounds
like so in ways music like is certainly a lot more complex from compared to music because its
tones in high frequency are full amplitude whereas typical music this would drop like
a rock over here so we're stressing the cable and the systems a lot more um i went ahead and tested
the generic cable the morrow sp3 and the analyzer itself on all three cases the distortion and noise
are identical they all land on top of each other and the colors actually mix in you can't see it
um our distortion is down at 21 to 22 bits uh it's about a minus 120 minus 125 to minus 130 remember
our threshold of hearing is minus 115 so we're at 15 to 20 db better than that as far as distortion
so whatever distortion the generic cables creating which the company said was a problem is below the
distortion floor of the audio precision analyzer which in turn is 20 30 db better than uh than
our hearing and that's basically a hundred to a thousand times better than our hearing so it the
analyzer is quite sensitive in that manner on this thing and uh we can also run a distortion plus
noise sweep uh where we vary the frequency and see if we have any distortion and noise and when i do
that again we see that there's just no difference both cables just land on top of each other and
there's just no way to distinguish them from each other they're just extremely clean minus 115-116
this is testing harmonic structure all the way up to 90 kilohertz so four and a half times the
audible band to compute the harmonic structure of 20 kilohertz and again just not a hair out of
place it just there's no difference there but i knew if i just stopped here people will say
well this doesn't look like an amplifier test and a speaker test because there's no speaker involved
and there's no amplifier involved and impedances are different so i figured i'd do a more clever
test in that i took this purify amplifier that i have this state-of-the-art amplifier and
used that to amplify the output of my audio precision analyzer and that gets connected to a
clip speaker that you can't see that's behind me i put the clutch speaker on a desk so that it's not
too loud although it has a port in the back so it was still whistling pretty loud from the back so
i cover the port also because we don't care about what the speaker is producing we want to measure
the effect of a cable and so if i did nothing this would just pump out test stones into the
amplifier and the amplifier produces this sends the signal to a speaker and the tones would play
but instead of just measuring that i went ahead and hooked up channel one and channel two of my
analyzer in a special way that the channel one is measuring what signal we have at the beginning
of the speaker cable and the channel two is measuring what's at the end of the speaker cable
then using uh simple math i can tell they analyze their software to just subtract one from the other
so whatever shows up is basically the losses or distortions or the noise that gets added or
it's not subtracted but if it were subtracted anything that's different different between these
two will show up so the effect is basically just the cable and nothing but the cable
i'm not measuring the amplifier which has its own distortions and noise and i'm not measuring the
speaker itself which has its own distortion noise i'm strictly measuring the cable in between now
the conditions are the way the cable gets used the load is on the right side it's a real speaker the
load on the left is an amplifier it's a switching amplifier so it has high frequency harmonics and
so forth it's it's uh harsher if you will on a cable because it produces more than just the
audible band so now around a sweep instead of just one tone is 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz and this is
what the difference looks like now don't worry about the shape of this graph in that the losses
seem to increase as you go to higher frequencies there are testing errors due to the cables i'm
using and so forth so all we care about in here is the difference between a generic cable and the
expensive cable higher end cable and i've got both of those plotted and you can barely see them
separated here and you might say okay so there is some difference in here no there isn't if you
look at the scale in here this is in decibel the lower scale is .015 db minus 0.15 and the
plus side is 0.006 so if you add up figure this out the entire scale from bottom to the top
is 1 10 of a db not 1 db 0.1 tp and within that we have this tiny tiny tiny change so
it just gets lost on that we can actually plot the difference between these two curves rather
than looking at them as an absolute and this is what the difference between the two cables are
and look at the number of zeros and decimal places in here is point zero zero zero six
db difference between the two um so it just it's an absurdity on top of absurdity level difference
but it shows you how accurate our instrumentation is we're able to measure things as if you know
um i'll turn on the light and your light dims you know 1000 miles away we can measure almost
effects that small uh with our instrumentation but no matter what we do we just can't tease out
any difference between these cables they're just made to pass through the signal and you know even
though we can measure some tiny differences your hearing is just so much worse than this that it's
just not even in within the realm of possibility to believe that this cable makes a difference so
i'd say the conclusions are pretty strong uh in that you know we're measuring the cable we're
instrumenting at different ways and in every way they're transparent which is good news so unlike
some cables that go try to have active components in them or too much capacitance or inductance
where they may cause issues this capability is benign and then it doesn't do anything but it
also has no benefit so if you're buying this cable and you already had a perfectly working
zip cord that you were happy with when i said zip cord by the way i mean the standard lamp chords
or the excuse me garden variety chords there's no reason to replace with something like this
unless you like the look of it unless you like the feel of it if this wires are exposed then you
like to have this exposed and you know you have a nice looking system and this is like jewelry for
for your equipment uh you're welcome to get it i actually don't have anything against this company
as i mentioned 150 to build you this is reasonable it has good feel and qualities i wish the company
would just go through their website and erase everything to do with all these claims of fidelity
and distortion all that and just said look the cables are cables but we make them to length
we terminate them exactly what you want we make them look nice you can have by wire single wire
any ending you want and that makes tidy and pretty behind your equipment the connectors are better
quality so they're not likely to pop out come loose on their own and i think you can still sell
cables for 150 and there'll be a lot of takers including a lot of people in our world uh even
i make well i don't have the need but if i did i wouldn't mind spending this kind of money
now if it were thousands of dollars that would be different ball game so bottom line feel free to
buy the cable i don't think they're ripping people off on on this cable at least at these prices
but certainly the marketing claims are wrong and i wish they would stop just repeating what others
do and and promote stuff like this okay thanks for watching and see you in a future video bye