"Best Cable I Have Yet Auditioned in My System"
Black Mesh Oval Nine is the newest version of the bestselling Analysis Plus Oval Nine speaker cable. It retains all of the critical features of original Oval Nine but now has better connectors and a dielectric with a faster rise time for better performance. Analysis Plus also optimized the oval geometry for even more uniform current distribution.
The conductor of the Beijing Symphony remarked that Oval Nine was the most realistic cable he'd ever heard for classical music reproduction. The unique geometry of Oval Nine's hollow oval cross-section design with braided conductors requires handcrafted termination. Each cable requires over an hour of handwork to complete, but the added benefits are worth the extra care.
Outperforms Way More Expensive Cables
"Analysis Plus Oval 9 copper cable is excellent," reports Michael Fremer in Stereophile. "It outperformed my (very expensive but no longer available) Yamamura 6000."
"The Oval Nine speaker cable is a Reviewers' Choice product if there ever was one," marvels Ian White in the June 2000 SoundStage! "Oval Nine increased transparency, low-end resolution, and depth right out of the box."
"Taken as a totality, this is the best cable I have yet auditioned in my system," says Stuart McCreary in the May 2000 issue of Stereo Times.
Revolutionary Hollow Oval Conductor Design
Analysis Plus is uniquely qualified as an authority on speaker cable design. The Flushing, Michigan-based company earned its reputation testing and analyzing cables for leading cable manufacturers whose names you'd recognize in a flash. After examining the best, Analysis Plus decided it could do even better by developing its own proprietary hollow-oval conductor design.
Why the unique conductor geometry? Mark Markel and Qinwei Sun, the chief engineers at Analysis Plus, determined that round cable used in conventional speaker cable designs has high levels of current bunching, skin effect phenomenon, and other frequency characteristics that degrade signal quality. Rectangular conductors were a little better, but these suffered high electric field values caused by sharp corners which can also cut into and injure the dielectric when the cable is flexed.
After many computer simulations, Analysis Plus found that a hollow oval cable was the best design due to its minimal change in resistance with frequency, plus other benefits. The company chose a flexible, braided conductor rather than the conventional solid conductor, which is susceptible to kinks and deformations with resulting signal degradation. A unique woven pattern places every wire statistically as close to the return current as every other wire for evenly distributed high-current density and superior sound.
Oval Nine incorporates a patent-pending woven design in which every conductor wire is statistically as close to the return current as every other wire. The result is evenly distributed current density that adds up to better signal transfer than conventional solid-conductor cable designs. The conductor consists of high-purity oxygen free copper combined with a computer-matched dielectric to give the best possible performance.
Amazingly Affordable
So, does all this cutting edge design and technology add up to a lot of money? Nope. "The Oval Nine speaker cable is so good and so inexpensive that it really deserves, and gets, a solo review, says Stuart McCreary in Stereo Times. "The big-buck cable boys are going to have a COW over this one."
"The most amazing thing about the Oval Nine, aside from its stellar performance, is the fact that it only costs $299," marvels Ian White in SoundStage!. "How do they do it? I don’t know. Quite frankly, I don’t care. After my time with this cable, all I could think about was how good it made my system sound."
