Price: $4899 per 2.5M pair
Website: www.siltech.com
Design: Siltech has a sparkling reputation as a cable and cord manufacturer that’s backed by real engineering, and the company puts out exceptionally high-quality products. Its Classic Legend series entered its fourth generation in 2021, and I was fortunate enough to receive a pair of Classic Legend 680L speaker cables for review. The speaker cables use Siltech’s ninth generation—and newest—proprietary silver-gold alloy conductors, which are covered in polyether ether ketone (PEEK) insulation sandwiched between two layers of Teflon. The cables are manufactured by hand in Siltech’s factory in Elst, The Netherlands; they’re tested against a reference pair to ensure quality and consistency, and they’re visually inspected by two different employees before being packaged for the customer. Their build quality is outstanding, and the rhodium-plated banana plugs on my review pair—which I obviously now own—look and feel perfect every time I plug them into a new amp or loudspeaker I have in for review. They also come with NFT tags to confirm authenticity, and they’re beautifully packaged. You get the sense that every single detail has been thoroughly scrutinized by the Siltech team.
Why I chose them: I found myself captivated by the Siltechs. Their sound was exemplary, a clear improvement over the significantly more affordable AudioQuest cables the Siltechs replaced. They seemed to remove a layer of hash and noise from my system, revealing additional layers of micro-detail that eluded my old cables, and they sounded pristinely extended along the way. It certainly didn’t hurt that I could quite literally feel the difference in quality between the 680Ls and the less expensive cables, both in terms of their fit and finish and their weight. These are heavy cables, due to the sheer quantity of silver in each 2.5m run. In the high-end, it can be easy to feel shortchanged by a product, but Siltech’s 680L speaker cables are worth every penny.
. . . Hans Wetzel
hansw@soundstagenetwork.com
