ArgentPur is a new audiophile cable company whose owner and designer Ernest Meunier is no newcomer when it comes to hi-fi. The company, whose name is a French term that translates to “Pure Silver” began quite recently as an assault on the standard requirements for transmitting audio signals.
Ernest Meunier grew up around giant pipe organs, ham radio, and speaker building. It is always great to have been a musician as well: he is a pianist with a Steinway B parked between his Parsifal loudspeakers, and is quite familiar with what a good recording of a reference piano sounds like!
Eventually, Ernie became tired of what he was hearing on his home reference system. “I decided to purchase subscriptions to the BSO (Symphony Hall) and The Cantata Singers (Jordan Hall) and reduced the amount of music I listened to at home, thereby keeping refreshed calibrations of live music’s “absolute sound”, if you will.”
“Tom Horrall, a renowned acoustician and recording engineer, as well as Michael Rudd, a former Peter Walker student, and preeminent laser interferometer, provided me with a wealth of knowledge.” I’d built a couple of speakers in my youth, as well as efforts with these titans in the 90’s….
“Knowing that the highest-quality amplifiers and speakers used solid silver wiring, I experimented with a variety of short connections that linked my amps’ output boards straight to my speakers. Until I personally experienced DIY pure solid Ag, they all sounded similar. Scaling up the Nordost ladder meant negotiating various treble and transient distortion artifacts. But now, as I sequentially replaced all links with DIY naked solid Ag, all of the... silver/copper bimetallic artifacts were gone!”
Interestingly, Mr.Meunier quite early on found some useful sonic surprises while testing his prototype cables. This is that the ArgentPur cables when used with certain power-thirsty Harbeth loudspeakers found that their already superb reproduction qualities became more macrodynamic…even in their bass responses!
He then proclaimed that it seemed improbable, but “maybe there’s something about solid Ag’s coherence that informs the ear-brain to squeeze out a bigger perceived bottom-end impact.”
“It’s a very real effect that cannot be explained by the simple mass of the conductor”. Yes, Ag is indeed 6% more efficient than ANY copper amalgam, but the psychoacoustic effect is larger than that. He continues, “It’s like the woofer jumped up a size, 5 to 6, 6-8, 8-10, etc. This has been especially true with Harbeths and classic Spendor loudspeakers that have superb midranges but more polite bottom (and top) ends”.
COMPANY ORIGINS
The genesis of ArgentPur became a reality when Ernie decided to revamp his reference Verity Audio Parsifal Encores to 25th Anniversary status, adding direct pure Ag wiring to close-sitting GaN-FET monoblock amps…and making new jumpers; all this from solid Ag conductors in roomy Teflon air tubes.
He was cajoled to delve further into perfectionist Ag wiring and cabling, establishing ArgentPur in 2022 (along with starting a relationship with a fretless 4-stringed mistress named a violoncello in some parlance). But back to the Parsifals…
“Re-cabling and refreshing those Parsifal Encores to 25th Anniversary physical status last year provided the entry for experiments with solid Ag wiring. I was unprepared for the improvements over my silver-PLATED Nordost references as I moved from jumpers to speaker cables to interconnects.” The results acquired here were almost revelatory” such that the ‘Golden Eared’ folks around Fidelis Distribution pushed him hard to start his own company.
“Through prototyping I discovered a few design refinements, such as incorporating variable stranding using the golden ratio, as well an insistence on complete Ag conductance, were required to achieve superlative performance. Three tiers of Interconnects based on performance and price would be the best starting point, with Speaker Cables iterations based on conductor mass.”
When speaking to Ernie, the advice he gives prospective audiophiles and clients is to try a particular level of his Interconnects along with an AgPur Speaker Cable that matches their speakers’ needs, as outlined reliably on their website (below.)
SILVER vs. COPPER
When comparing silver to copper, which has a technically defined maximum theoretical transmission of 100%, pure silver, (Ag) has a conductivity of 106%. Accordingly, even umpteen nines copper can’t come close to pure silver.
Non-incidentally, many of the silver-plated copper conductors that are available on the market today have left me personally feeling underwhelmed after trying them. Some may even characterize them as “bright,” “etched,” or having “glare” because of the compromised features that limit top octave clarity and coherence. Theoretically, such trade-offs are absent from pure silver, which also lacks its bimetallic SOUND.
Ernie: “I continue to run into a significant number of professional and enthusiast listeners who characterize “silver” wires as always being problematic. However, continued listening to ArgentPur eliminated all of these prejudices. While pondering why no one was employing solid pure silver except at highly exorbitant prices, I merged a few technical pearls from Cardas (Golden Ratio building), Kimber (self-shielding), and Siltech (metallurgy).…
“I quickly discovered that not only did hand-built cables need a lot of time…4–7 hours for my speaker cables and several hours for ICs—but that the cost of materials was prohibitive for the established players.”
The AgPur Speaker Cables are arrayed by size according to current demands. For the majority of speaker loads, the AgPur13 is a “Goldilocks” model, which can be enjoyed by most enthusiasts’ systems, (at a lower price point) while the burlier 12 reviewed here, and 11 were typically designed for some of the Maggies, Wilsons, Apogees, and other choice speaker configurations.
CONSTRUCTION
To quote Ernest, “The optimum media for the Ag conductors to rest in are air, a vacuum (which is somewhat impracticable), and, if necessary, low dielectric effect insulative barriers. The fluorocarbons unquestionably represent the best of them.”
To minimize the dielectric effect further, each Ag strand used in ArgentPur is manually threaded through its fluorocarbon tube that is 5-10x larger, thereby allowing contact between the Ag conductor strand and its protective carrier to be dramatically reduced by this roomy air space. Capacitance and inductance are thus minimized, with the benefit of no “signal-hopping” destructive interference across the frequency spectra.
Achieving the necessary conductor mass involved individual strands of 9995 Ag to be aggregated in the company’s ‘Golden Ratios’ and placed in their capacious thin-walled Teflon tubes. The 9995 pure Ag strands floating in roomy air cushions through thin-walled Teflon to all the Ag connectors made sense in every way.
Of course, reducing mutual inductance and controlling capacitance was mandatory, and the solid Ag strand cores of ArgentPur cables are initially formed as twisted pairs, and subsequently, they are aggregated into spirals and star quads. Twisted pairs or tri-braids create the final exterior geometry of these sets (AgPur Speaker or Interconnects).
Dealer enquiries welcome
