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Japanese cable brands

Inspired by a recent thread somewhere around here about brands from South Korea. I have always been fascinated by Japanese hifi gear. From vintage Sansui and Pioneer to more modern things like Esoteric DACs, TAD Labs speakers, everything from Luxman and Accuphase.

That got me thinking about cables. I've used some of the Esoteric Mexcel cables and loved them. I've always wanted to try Acrolink, and recently learned that they actually make all the Esoteric branded cables. Acoustic Revive has some very intriguing designs. I've heard great things about the cables offered by TAD Labs and just learned they are made by another Japanese brand called Tiglon. Turns out Tiglon is just now available in the US so I've got an inquiry in to try them out.

Anybody have experience with these or other high end cables from Japan? Availability seems to be the challenge for trying these out unless you live there. They seem to be extremely nice cables if you can get your hands on them.

 

996turbo911
richardbrand's avatar
richardbrand
1,362 posts
 

Just recently I bought a Japanese SoulNote Equalizer (had never heard of the brand before).

SoulNote has its roots in Marantz high-end design team, and has the lofty ideal of becoming the world's best.  Their chief designer's mantra focusses on the time domain rather than the frequency domain, because music is varying sound pressure in time.

They currently offer just three cables.  One is for clock signals.  The others are an interconnect cable in two lengths.

The interconnect cable is balanced and uses solid core copper in a foamed Teflon dielectric, and is unshielded.  Different, but makes sense to me

sbrownnw
742 posts
 

+1 on Mogami speaker and wire for RCA / XLR cables.  FYI, I have some extra custom Mogami RCAs I am thinking of selling after consolidating my system.

jafant's avatar
jafant
21,553 posts
 

Another +vote for HIJIRI.

 

Happy Listening!

996turbo911 OP
205 posts
 

Thanks for all the posts. I forgot to mention that right now I'm in the market for an Ethernet cable. Hijiri doesn't seem to make one. Acoustic Revive has a few but I'm not able to easily find their top model in the USA. 

I ended up ordering a Tiglon TPL-3000L White Tiger which was just under $2k. We'll see how that goes. It is a new release so not much info out there, the mid range TPL-2000L gets excellent reviews though.

If I need some interconnects down the road, I might try Hijiri or stick with Tiglon, we'll see how it goes.

996turbo911 OP
205 posts
 

Turns out the Tiglon TPL-3000L White Tiger LAN cable won't be available until mid-May at the earliest. Due to heavy demand I guess. So I switched my order to the TPL-2000L Professional which was the former top model and will ship much sooner. I've read it has a very organic, analog sound to it, which is exactly what I am looking for.

It looks like the majority of Japanese cable brands focus on the interconnects, speaker cables, and maybe power cables. Not many offer digital and especially things like I2S over HDMI or Ethernet. So I'm glad I found at least one option to try out.

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