Transparent Audio started in Maine in 1980, in a farmhouse that was already a hundred and seventy-five years old, and spent its first decade distributing other people's equipment before deciding in 1993 to build its own. Karen Sumner, Jack Sumner, and Carl Smith founded it, and the company still works out of Maine.

What sets a Transparent cable apart is visible from across the room: the network housing partway along its length. Inside is a low-pass filter network, and the reasoning behind it is stated plainly — an ordinary cable is inherently better at passing radio frequencies than audio ones, and the network is there to balance that back out. The part worth understanding is what follows: because a cable's electrical behaviour changes with its length, Transparent calibrates every network to the specific length of the cable it is fitted to. A three-metre pair is not a two-metre pair with more wire. On the upper series the calibration extends further, to the electrical characteristics of the particular component being connected.

Generation 6 is the current design on the top four tiers — Reference, XL, Opus, and Magnum Opus — where the network housings are filled with a flexible epoxy resin and shelled in carbon fibre, with the flagship adding a carbon plate and an acrylic plinth on a damping layer.

The range is a single clear ladder from Hardwired and Wave at the entry through Plus, Super, and Ultra to Reference and above, repeated across speaker cables, interconnects, power cords, and power conditioning.

Most of it is made by hand in Maine, much of it in home production studios the company sets up and maintains, by technicians who have been building these products for decades and a good number of whom are working musicians.

Because every network is calibrated to length and, higher up, to the components at each end, Transparent is specified rather than picked off a shelf — bring the details of your system, or the system itself in mind: Wilson Audio and Dan D'Agostino owners in particular will find the pairing well charted. Contact us to spec a loom.