Chord Electronics quantum materials research
Strange things are afoot in East Farleigh. Chord Electronics have bought and refurbished the Victorian boiler house that sits between the Pumphouse that the company has inhabited for decades and the river for which these buildings were created. This new facility has allowed Chord Electronics to move its offices out and made extra space for production; it already looks pretty full so things must have been getting pretty cramped before the expansion.
Tom Vaughan told us about the work he does in the studio world where Chord Electronics’ amplifiers have been established since the early days of the company. On one occasion he got a call on Wednesday evening from a New York studio which had to have a pair of their monoblocks for a session on the Friday, for which had to drop everything he was doing, sequester a pair of amps destined for another customer and fly them out in time for the recording. Tom also showed us some of the Ultima amps being built up in the production department which he runs when he’s not hanging out in studios.
More extreme however is Chord Electronics’ founder John Franks’ Quantum materials research lab, a turnkey project where an international team are developing a new generation of conductors using carbon nano tubes (CNT). This is not an audio specific programme, it goes way beyond Chord Electronics’ normal field with applications pretty well anywhere that requires low mass, super conducting cables. Which in today’s world is pretty much everywhere from electric cars to light aircraft, batteries and pretty much anything that moves.
The lab has focussed on combining CNTs with copper foil using some very advanced technology and a very unusual piece of machinery (top of page) that can make alloys with extremely high precision. The aim of the research is to produce a carbon/copper hybrid that weighs significantly less than pure copper and has the super conducting benefits of CNTs. Apparently CNTs don’t conduct if they are too close to one another due to quantum tunnelling effects, hence the use of the copper substrate. Another benefit of this technology is that it is more ecologically friendly because it doesn’t require the quantities of raw materials usually needed for high conductivity, but rather combines carbon rich gases, copper and halides alongside the CNTs.
The end goal is for Chord Electronics to licence and or sell the technology to companies for large scale manufacture. They hope to have “good results” within six months. Which suggests that quantum audio cables are still a long way off but not beyond possibility.
