There's Nothing Else Like It
Quiescent's extraordinary combination of electronic and structural design, materials, electronic noise reduction and acoustic noise reduction puts it in a league of one.
Quiescent Peak and Apex Speaker Cables
Superb speaker cables that offer incredible performance on their own or go even further as part of an overall Quiescent strategy.
Peak Speaker Cables, indicative price 2.0m pair, bananas, £2,700.00. Apex Speaker Cables, indicative price 2.0m pair, bananas, £4,800.00. Full pricing for your length and connector requirements on application.
About the Peak & Apex Speaker Cables
The Apex Speaker Cables are a very serious cable indeed. In our experience they're simply one of the very best on the market. And combine them with a set of the Quiescent speaker modules and they're in a league of one – no other speaker hookup system has that level of quality, combined with so much RFI and vibration reduction.
And Quiescent don't really do 'entry level' products, rather they tend to cut back on the material costs of their ultimate products for a lower price point. So the Peak speaker cable employs silver-plated OFC conductors rather than the solid-core silver found in the Apex line.
All the other features of these two cables are essentially the same of course, the air dielectric insulation arrangement, the EMI absorption tubing and the ABS anti-vibration outer sleeving. Add to that either the very fine WBT nextgen copper connectors, or the silver versions on the Apex, and you have a choice of two speaker cables of exemplary capability.
Tech Insight
One interesting feature of all of the Quiescent cable lines is the use of 'ABS' acoustically damped braiding. This specialist braiding, originally developed for cockpit headset cables in order to reduce vibration induced interference, has a significant effect on the sound quality of these speaker cables according to Quiescent. By reducing the amount of acoustic energy both absorbed and conducted by the cable, the amount of acoustic energy that can travel down the speaker cable from the high-vibrational energy connection at the speaker, back to the amplifier, is significantly reduced.
Specifications
Peak Speaker Cable
Conductors – Single 1.5mm 99.9% oxygen-free solid-core copper conductors with 10% silver-plating for high transient current carrying capability.
Connectors – WBT nextgen™ copper 8mm spades or WBT nextgen™ copper 4mm banana plugs.
Apex Speaker Cable
Conductors – Twin 1.25mm 99.9% solid-core silver conductors for high transient current carrying capability.
Connectors – WBT nextgen™ silver 8mm spades or WBT nextgen™ silver 4mm banana plugs.
Peak & Apex Speaker Cable
Construction – Teflon™ air-tube insulation and Quiescent proprietary EMI/RFI absorption tubing for low noise.
Outer Covering – ABS acoustically damped braiding.
Lengths – 0.5m increments up to a maximum 5m per cable.
Matching & Setup
These cables are a great match in any good mid-fi setup and upward. They are very neutral in their fundamental tonality so don't tend to enhance or trip-up any frequency band. But to our ears it's the combination of the other main factors, RFI and acoustic energy reduction, that is the real game changer. Swapping out a set of conventional speaker cables for these brings a sense of much more control and much more openness, more fine detail yet also a more generous tonal palette.
The Peak and Apex cables, along with the Peak Speaker Modules give you a lot of choices for setup combinations and performance levels. And indeed, are great for a rolling upgrade plan. You can, for example, swap out conventional leads for a set of Peak leads, then later add a set of the Peak modules for another serious performance jump.
At any level with Peaks/Apex/modules, with a good amplifier and revealing speakers, system setup will almost certainly benefit from some speaker position adjustment to find a new sweetspot that will deliver more transparency and three-dimensionality than ever before. See our recent speaker setup blog for more ideas.