Hi All,
First off, I really appreciate everyone’s interest in our now officially launched MasterBuilt Audio cables. It’s been a long road getting here to be the world-wide distributor of these excellent cables which first started in 2008 when we were approached by VSA customers who wanted us to audition a cable they were working on.
As I’m sure you can all understand, we approach wire the same way we do any other speaker component; with a mixture of skepticism and reserved excitement. You never know where the next great component will come from but it usually requires wading through a sea of at best, mediocre “me-too” components. But for us, it always comes down to the testing and listening. Only then can we know the true value of a component and whether it belongs in one of our VSA designs.
And that’s how we came to understand what a revolutionary product this was and how we wanted/needed to be a part of its development as well as incorporate it into our go-forward products.
This initially began by using the wire in our speakers. As the MasterBuilt Audio engineers developed their system cables which has come to be known as the Reference Line, we waited eagerly for each cable to arrive at our sound room. As we incorporated first Power Cords, then later Interconnects and finally Speaker Cables, our factory reference system transformed. From my personal experience, adding each cable was like removing a dirty pane of glass that was restricting me from seeing the image right in front of me without even knowing the barrier was there.
Now I know to some, MasterBuilt must seem like a recently developed product and oh-by-the-way, they have four complete lines. How did this company suddenly spring up out of nowhere and what credibility could they have? From our perspective, this has been an eight year effort of development both inside and outside the company with a lot of help from “beta testers” who’s opinions we very much value. In true VSA fashion, we focus more on engineering and development and less on marketing which explains (at least for myself) how we came up with four complete lines before officially launching it. Development is our comfort zone but Leif and I are working very hard to grow our “marketing wings” as it were.
That said, we’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars to demonstrate these cables with our speakers at shows since 2008. Actually, it’s more like 6 figures if I were to add it up. Now I’m not claiming this was simply out of the goodness of our hearts, far from it. Our motivations are entirely self-serving as we go to shows to win awards and these cables have been a huge element of our arsenal. But if you go back and check, these cables have been present in every show award we’ve received since 2008. That goes double when you consider all of Endeavor Audio’s awards since they used MasterBuilt Audio cables as well, both externally and internally.
So that’s our involvement with MasterBuilt Audio in a nutshell and a summarized history of its development for anyone interested.
Now as for discussing the technology involved with MasterBuilt’s performance, I’m going to wear my distributors hat here and be very frank. We have no interest in publicly illustrating any of their proprietary technology.
In order to address by documentation the understandable skepticism (frankly the same we approach anyone else’s claims), we would need to publicly explain in great technical detail how MasterBuilt achieves its performance. This explanation would inevitably involve a detailed discussions on their competitors and WHY MasterBuilt outperforms them based largely on the errors (from MB’s perspective) they’ve made in their development. Our goal is to market these cables and we’re very comfortable inviting people to hear the difference for themselves, in A/B/X shootouts or otherwise. But there is no logical reason to reveal proprietary information and in the course, educate the competition.
Here’s a quote I’m very fond of from the George R .R. Martin’s Game of Thrones novels, “Words are wind.” I think that sums up any marketing hype nicely. The proof is where rubber meets road in its actual performance. If I could send a full loom of these cables to everyone that wanted to hear the difference for themselves in their system, I would. Unfortunately I can’t afford to do so. Due to the licensing and US manufacturing, this stuff isn’t cheap even at my prices. So I need to be selective. We will continue to demonstrate them at shows, I will continue to send them to people who’ve established themselves prominently in the audio space as credible critics which includes but is not limited to industry press. I will also encourage our dealers and distributors to invest in “loaners” for local customers. But that is as much as I see possible to give people the benefit of my own first hand experiences.
As so many current owners of MasterBuilt have already stated in this thread, other threads and other forums, you simply need to experience it for yourself. I hope you all have that opportunity in the near future. If you’re still reading this wall of text, thanks for taking the time to do so
