2023 Golden Ear: Siltech Classic Legend 880 Cables

880i interconnect, $15,765 for a 4.5-meter pair

880L speaker cable, $9270 for a 2.5-meter pair

The Dutch company Siltech has always maintained that silver is the best conductor of a musical signal and has spent four decades conducting metallurgic research to advance the performance of all its products. Siltech’s Classic Legend Series of cables represents the “sweet spot” in terms of performance/cost for the manufacturer, between the entry-level Explorer Series that employs high-purity copper conductors and the Royal Crown Series where all models use monocrystal silver wire (a 2.5-meter pair of the Royal Crown speaker cables can cost more than $100k). All Classic Legend cables use a silver-gold alloy of the company’s design—the gold atoms will displace contaminants in the silver crystal matrix and fill resulting voids in the structure—in a twisted coaxial twin-core configuration. Siltech has found that this improves both the performance and longevity of the product and shortens the required break-in time. For insulation/shielding, there’s a triple-layer construction using Teflon and the thermoplastic polymer PEEK. Spade and banana terminations are rhodium-plated; the pins of the XLR interconnect are gold-plated. With these wires in your system, the noise floor drops substantially, and dynamics and detail improve dramatically. The cables add no colorations of their own to musical sounds. (not reviewed)