Whiplash Audio TWAg

However, the TWAg is more than just about soft and flexible. A lot of the pure silver cable available on the market is either very stiff or very fragile. The stiff ones are mostly single core, designed to be used for internal amplifier wiring. The other ones are flexible 30AWG or smaller wires, but they have very fragile strands that doesn’t stand to the abuses of headphone and IEM use. I have a few DIYer friends who’s tried many things from the solid cores to the tiny tonearm cables. Most of them are detail freaks, with lifetime love to the Etymotics ER4. Yet, even with their physical limitation, most of them still deliver a sound that is inferior to the TWAg.

Most of the other brand cables are either pure copper (ie Jena) or silver plated copper (ie APS). The Moon Audio Silver Dragon is a very good cable too, but it’s designed primarily for headphone use. So, the reality is, the TWAg is the only cable that I know that offers the superb performance and yet remains quite flexible for IEM use. The only other wire that betters the TWAg is the Crystal Piccolino, also silver, reference class performance, and also very flexible. But the Crystal Piccolino sells for a $1,068 for a typical custom IEM length, which makes the TWAg quite a bargain.

A good cable first and foremost should lets you hear more of the music, and that normally includes better detail levels, bigger soundstage, more open sound, clearer separation. Yet the technicalities shouldn’t get in the way of the music. Some cable can do all of what I mentioned and yet sounding cold or harsh, lacking musicality and refinement. Using the TWAg cables for the JHCustoms, from the JH5Pro to the JH16Pro, the sound is more open, more airy, and the midrange to treble transition is smoother. With the HD800, I’m just hearing more detail and more transparency on the music. I don’t think the TWAg affects bass in any way. However, if most silver wires I’ve tried have the tendency to sound dry and bright (mostly I prefer copper wires, or silver plated copper over pure silver), the TWAg has a slight hint of warm and is very organic sounding. So in that sense the TWAg’s sound signature is quite different than most silver wires I’ve tried

To be frank, there are a lot of other cable offerings that I haven’t tried. I know that SAA makes a $1,400 cable for the HD800, but I don’t think I’ll be using that cable anytime soon. I also know that cable manufacturers constantly develop better variants of their cable, and since I’m not keeping track of all of those developments, I really won’t say that the Whiplash TWAg is the best cable there is. But for all practical purposes, and among all the experiences I have with cables, consider me very impressed with the TWAg cable.