Atlas Asimi Grun Luxe 4-4 Speaker Cables
Asimi uses very high purity OCC (Ohno Continuous Casting) silver conductors. The OCC process is named after professor Atsumi Ohno, who in the late 1970s, discovered that by heating the drawing mould to a higher temperature than the molten copper you intend to cast, then cooling it soon after, the result is one long, high purity (99.99997%) metal crystal. Criticism of silver cables as generally ‘bright’ are in fact the result of impurities and grain in the inferior conductors used.
The Asimi’s high-purity monocrystal conductors are arranged in a complex multi-stranded layout, with each cable leg composed of 3 pairs of solid conductors (two pairs plus one pair), totalling 5.5mm² – an unusually high figure, given the cost of this purity of silver.
In most silver cables, the conductor size is compromised to reduce cost –but which explains why some critics suggest silver cables offer the listener very sweet highs but no weight or authority at low frequencies. That’s certainly not true of the Asimi, with several reviewers commenting on the sense of physical presence conveyed.
Our focus was also on the coating that insulates and protects the silver. The Asimi has these conductors enveloped in our microporous Teflon dielectric. This new air-spaced material improves on the performance of the best solid Teflon or PTFE (Teflon™) insulators, by providing a 30% greater signal velocity and superior integrity, particularly in high frequency delivery. This is achieved because the new material has a dielectric constant of around 1.5 (the lower the number the better), significantly better than the 2.1 typically achieved by the PTFE (Teflon™) insulators which were previously the best available in these applications.
This obsessive attention to detail – and the combination of materials & assembly methods which was only finalised after exhaustive testing – produces a cable which HiFi World’s reviewer described as‘ the best he’d ever heard’ and HiFi Plus summarised as ‘one of the very, very best. ’
Our goal to make cables which have no discernable character or sound of their own, which would in itself be a form of distortion – Asimi is engineered to ‘disappear’ in your system, conveying the performance of your equipment with total transparency. It should be noted though that Asimi requires a ‘burn-in’ period during which the sound will continue to improve.
