Brand Spotlight – Vortex Cables

The Affordable Luxury!

The product was provided to me on loan for review purposes in exchange for my honest opinion.

Manufacturer website: Vortex. Available for sale from authorized retailers like Musicteck.

Preamble.

I’m aware that some people are skeptical about cable contribution to the audio chain. It’s not my intent to start an argument here. Instead, I would like to share what I hear during my testing. Perhaps, I can’t fully explain why there is a change in sound, but I do hear it and don’t find it to be a placebo effect, especially in blind testing of various cables with IEMs. What makes sense is that a metal wire is a material with physical properties of resistivity, conductivity, and purity, acting as a filter between your source and earphones. Variations of these physical properties could affect the conductivity of analog signal, resulting in a sound change, from a subtle to a more noticeable level. Also, the sound change introduced by a specific cable is not universal because it will depend on the design of earphones and their synergy with a source.

Intro.

Since I only had a week with these cables before returning them to Musicteck, this is going to be labeled as a Spotlight Review, a shorter review focusing on introduction of Vortex brand I wasn’t myself familiar with, going over their design and quick sound impressions which should help you decide which cable will suit you better if you are looking to pick one. All the testing was done using P6 Pro as my neutral sources, and Jewel, Odin, and RN6 IEMs for a variety of monitors with a different sound sig to find a common sound enhancement/change characteristics between Eddie^2, Seraphina, Minerva, Lavinia, and Nadia cables from Vortex.

Design technology.

From the Vortex website, I learned that the company is Hong Kong based, operating on a main principle of an “affordable luxury”. To ensure the quality of their products, they have put a considerable effort into the wire structure and material selection, as well as the design of the custom hardware, packaging, and accessories. Their main goal of the company is to provide customers with high-quality upgrade cables at an affordable price without compromising on quality.

According to Vortex website, their C.F.S. series cables (Carry Fashion Sound) are designed to be comfortable, lightweight, and stylish, setting them apart from other traditional cables that use nylon fiber as the coating material, by featuring a coating of artificial silk thread which is hypoallergenic. Furthermore, the artificial silk thread has excellent shock-absorbing properties, reducing the microphonic effect and enhancing the user experience.

Some of the highlights of their wire technology as mentioned on their website:

Shielded twisted pair – with the introduction of the 4.4 mm balanced terminal, the demand for precise signal transmission has increased. It is well-known that shielded cables generally have a “quiet” background, but the high-frequency grounding can sometimes lead to a reduction in the sound, causing it to become muted. Vortex came up with a way to independently insulate the outer skin and twisted the positive and negative poles to cancel out the effects of voltage changes.
Japanese NUC “Air-Injection” Technology – among HiFi cables, PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) is one of the top insulating materials due to its excellent dielectric constant which reduces the impact of the insulation layer on high frequencies while achieving a tighter low-frequency coherence. Vortex uses the technique of “air-injection” to create the insulation layer’s outer skin using polyethylene. As 25% of the insulating material is air, the insulation layer even has a lower dielectric constant than PTFE, further reducing the accumulation of microcharges in the insulation material and making the high-frequency signal more accurate.
Composite Insulation Damping -in addition to using air-injected polyethylene for the main insulation of the core and twisting the positive and negative poles, Vortex has also added a damping layer to counteract external vibrations to quiet the background further.
Golden Ratio – Vortex has developed a proprietary golden cable ratio specifically designed for in-ear headphones. Due to the skin effect, high-frequency signals tend to be transmitted on the surface of the conductor, so having thinner conductors with a larger relative surface area result in less distortion in the high-frequency range. Based on this principle, the core of the cable uses three different materials with diameters in a golden ratio to create unique channels for different frequencies to conduct.

I know that some people treat the technology behind cables as snake oil and probably will take the above with a grain of salt. Regardless of that, the point of me listing the tech behind these cables is to show that Vortex is an example of another company that doesn’t just buy 3^rd party wires and randomly throws stuff together. They invest their time and resources into research and development to come up with something more original in addition to being affordable. The only thing “borrowed” are the ConX modular interchangeable connectors adopted into the design to give more flexibility for their cables to be compatible with different connector IEMs.

Except for Eddie^2 cable which has a slightly different original packaging, the overall design of the rest of Vortex cables packaging is similar, more premium, using a larger storage box, a stamped with Vortex logo leather insert cover, a leather (pleather?) carrying case for the cable and possibly IEM attached to it, a leather organizer strap, and a warranty card. And except for Lavinia, which comes with a full set of ConX connectors, the rest get a basic (2pin/mmcx) ConX set.