Supra Cables

Swedish engineering, published specifications, sensible prices

Supra have been making cable in Ljungskile, Sweden since 1976, when Tommy Jenving, an engineer who had come from Ericsson, began building speaker cable at a time when most people were using lighting flex. That makes Supra one of the oldest specialist audio cable companies in the world and arguably the first of them all. The business still trades as Jenving Technology, and its character is easy to describe: everything is specified, nothing is mysterious, and the prices are lower than the engineering warrants. Supra themselves call it the No-Nonsense Concept.

That is the reason they get recommended so often. A Supra speaker cable or LoRad mains cable will publish its conductor size, its construction, its capacitance and its compliance with Swedish and European electrical standards. There is real engineering behind them, including zoned tin plating that raises the conductor's resistance progressively towards the outside to deal with skin effect. What there is not is mystique. The reasoning is set out in plain language and can be checked against the figures.

The LoRad mains cables are the best known part of the range. LoRad is short for low radiation, and the design came out of Jenving's research into reducing power-line radiation, which found that low inductance rather than low capacitance was the thing that mattered. They are properly shielded, correctly rated and available made up or by the metre with Supra's own plugs, which makes them one of the few straightforward upgrades in the mains category.

The Cat 8 network cables have found their own following for the same reasons: solidly built, fully specified, and priced so that trying one is a small decision.

Supra also make an unusually wide catalogue of general-purpose cable, which is useful when a job needs something specific rather than something premium.