True Signal Audio cables

How to differentiate yourself in a market that’s crammed with apparently similar products? That’s the question that every cable maker has to answer if they are to succeed and one that TSA or True Signal Audio have failed to do with their choice of the brand name. TSA does, however, have an angle that is new to me at least, which is that it is owned by a larger (albeit unnamed) American company that produces cables for medical, military and aerospace industries.

The benefit that being part of a larger organisation brings is that the cables are made from the ground up, literally extruded from the bare metal, to create material combinations and topologies that are precisely what TSA requires. This is quite rare within the audio industry, where the majority buy from industrial manufacturers and have to commit to miles of the stuff in order to get the design desired, many use what’s available off the reel and work around it to achieve the end result.

TSA is based in Hertfordshire and hand makes pretty well the full gamut of audio cables with analogue and digital interconnects of most varieties and two models of speaker cable. It also makes a power cable called Maestro. There are different levels within these categories but the catalogue isn’t enormous overall and prices start at £400 for the Silver level RCA interconnects. They, therefore, occupy the middle to the upper ground without going to extremes in price terms.

The Silver in the name of many models does not indicate pure silver conductors but indicates a mix of copper and silver stranded wire which is said to be of high quality and, equally important, uniformity. Silver Ultimate models use hand-extruded silver-plated copper wire. In both instances, TSA’s owner Tony Monaghan uses low mass plugs because: “Low mass and resistance is key in aerospace applications and crosses over beautifully to audio”. The cables use a hollow tip star line RCA plug with a silver-plated centre pin and plastic collar with a single point negative connector that’s similar to a Bullet plug.

The connector preferred for speaker cables has recently changed from a hollow Z compression plug to a 4mm spring plug TSA calls ‘the Glider’; this is a silver-plated plug that’s both soldered and compressed onto the cable. It looks similar to the plugs that Naim used to use albeit they weren’t silver plated. I reviewed a three-metre pair of True Signal Audio Silver Ultimate speaker cables equipped with these plugs alongside Silver Phono RCA and Silver Ultimate XLR interconnects in one-metre lengths. TSA dealer VAL HiFi also sent some 1.5m Maestro power leads with the MSD 13A plug and a one-metre True Phase Stream USB cable. All are professionally built and finished and don’t come in boxes that suggest all the money has been spent on them, which is always encouraging as there’s only so much a fancy box can do for the sound of your system.