My father and his parents—my grandparents (obviously)—were kind, generous, inoffensive people. They wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouth full of it.
For the most part, I do my best to emulate them, especially when it comes to reviewing stereo equipment. I’ve sent back equipment without reviewing it when I’ve had nothing positive to say. I believe there’s no value in crucifying a component and doing harm to its makers if I find nothing to like about it—maybe it would be appropriate for other audiophiles with different tastes and requirements. There’s plenty of gear out there that suits me, that I’ll enjoy. So why not just review that?
Besides, who wants to listen for weeks, or even months, to a component that doesn’t sound good? And then try to find some way to spin distaste? So it’s part benevolence and part laziness. Let’s just call it enlightened self-interest.
Show coverage is by necessity written at high speed, so there’s a fair bit of spontaneity involved. At this year’s High End show in Munich, Germany, I was typing as fast as I could when I came across the show announcement for Voodoo Labs’ Witchcraft speaker cables. I was a bit snarky and called out the German company for its hyperbolic claims. I don’t normally do this, because calling out pseudoscience in the cable world is like shooting fish in a barrel. I could have just as easily lashed out at a half-dozen other companies without breaking a logical sweat.
I had paid a visit to the Audionet room, ostensibly to check out the company’s new Mach preamp and Schrödinger mono amplifier, but in large part to get a look at the Voodoo Labs cables that I was set to bitch about.
The sound quality in the Audionet room was excellent. They’d set up a killer system with a pair of Vivid Audio speakers, and the Witchcraft cables looked extremely cool, like nothing I’d seen before. I spent a short while talking to Jan Geschke, the president of Voodoo Labs, and I began to feel like a bit of a dick. Geschke was immediately likable—open and friendly, intelligent and well-spoken. I didn’t get the feeling that he was trying to bamboozle me.
After Geschke had read my write-up on the Audionet room, and my castigation of his cable literature, he emailed me regarding the snippet I’d chosen to quote: “The whole paragraph clearly states its purpose—disorienting would-be copyists—and drives a zig-zag course between self-irony and sarcasm. Which is a property of this brand, starting with the deliberately absurd name. I know there’s no space at all for humour in high-end, but I insist.”
We conversed for a while further by email, and before long we were planning a review of the Witchcraft cable. God help me.
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble
There’s a lot going on here. Retailing for $9600 per 2m pair (in USD), the Witchcraft package is like nothing else I’ve seen. There are three slim (1.4mm diameter) conductors per leg, six per channel. The wire itself is made from oxygen-free copper, plated with tin. Yes, tin. I did some digging, and it turns out that tin is highly resistant to corrosion and does not tarnish. It’s not as conductive as copper or silver, but that’s not the point, said Geschke. The copper is only there to show “the tin atoms where to stay in time and place.” And the tin’s free electrons are “a suggestion to the EM field that is the signal where to connect to.”
Each conductor is insulated by a fabric sheath made from cotton. Yes, cotton. Again, I defer to Geschke: “Cotton is much preferable to all plastic contraptions because of its very low electric and magnetic field constants. Whatever the signal touches reduces its speed by the square root of these constants multiplied with each other (said Maxwell in 1865, who usually is very right).”
The Voodoo Labs cables are terminated with bare wire. Yes, bare wire. Geschke says that termination “just adds hurdles for the music.” But if you don’t want “the utmost reachable,” Voodoo will accommodate you: “If you insist, and only then, we can weepingly fit your Witchcraft with gold-plated Furutech bananas or shoes at the sum of €400 extra, which we really do not want from you.”
And to Voodoo Labs’ credit, you should really take the time to consider the matter. Why on earth would you spend many coupons on expensive cables with intricate, esoteric topologies, and then jam a connector on each end for the carefully massaged signal to squeeze through?
Suffice to say, there’s a whole lot of unconventional but apparently sensible thinking going on here. The audio industry has moved away from minimalism and has embraced complication. Pretty much every high-end wire is either extremely thick, with many layers of conductors, insulation, and sheathing, or extremely complicated and esoteric. Here we have none of that—instead, we have simple ingredients in their most primal forms, but configured in a new and visually compelling manner.
Which brings us to what’s most striking about the Witchcraft speaker cables: the Gauss risers, and the grids that slot into them, which keep each wire consistently spaced from its neighbor. Faraday grids, Geschke calls them. They’re made from a light and exceptionally strong aluminum-magnesium alloy—the snappily named AlMgty 80, a product of Fehrmann Alloys. AlMgty 80 is a proprietary metal powder that is sintered, layer by layer, via a laser—an industrial process called additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. “We have sourced the manufacturing of this part out to the guys who are working for Ferrari and building turbine parts of the Eurofighter,” Geschke said. “They have the machines. And the fire insurance, for when some magnesium residue in the machines spontaneously goes up in a very, very hot flame.”
Voodoo Labs claims that AlMgty 80’s almost perfectly aligned crystal structure—in contrast to the haphazard clumping of most other alloys—makes the Faraday grids and towers invisible to electromagnetic fields.
An important note here. Voodoo Labs has been granted a patent on the Gauss riser, paraphrased by Geschke as “a paramagnetic device with a magnetic field constant of almost exactly 1 that frees the EM field around any speaker cable, which propagates the music from inductive influences and added capacitance from touched materials.”
The company was granted a further patent on the Faraday grids, paraphrased by Geschke as “a speaker cable system able to propagate a very large EM field undisturbed by inductive or capacitive influences.”
As an assembled whole, Voodoo Labs claims that the Witchcraft cable is electromagnetically nonexistent when viewed from the perspective of the musical signal. Since the vast majority of the electronic signal travels in the dielectric surrounding the conductor, the minimalist cloth sheath means that the signal is traveling, for the most part, in air.
The Witchcraft cables came packaged in a sturdy wooden crate. There wasn’t much cushioning for the contents, which didn’t worry me as there’s not really anything breakable in there. However, given the substantial price of this cable system, it would have been nice to see some sort of custom padding riding inside.
As of right now, Voodoo Labs does not have a US distributor. The cables will be available for sale on the company’s site via Shopify, but that means you’ll have to deal with duty and taxes if you’re located in North America. Consider, though, that duty and taxes will likely be cheaper than the inevitable markup added by a distributor—that’s my life hack for today.
Installation was simple. Decant the cables from the box, stretch them out to their full length, and then slide the grids out so that they’re evenly spaced. Then give the bare wires an extra twiddle for good luck and do your best to sandwich them into the binding posts.
Honestly, it has been maybe 20 years since I’ve had to deal with bare wires. On my home-theater rig, and with my vintage Eico HF-81 integrated, I used adapters purchased on eBay to capture my cheapo bare wires into banana plugs or spades so I have appropriate connectors for whatever appliance I’m using. I have not missed dealing with bare wires. That said, it wasn’t too bad, and by bending the ends of the wires into gentle curves, I was able to get a solid, firm connection without much bother.
I sent Geschke a photo of my setup and he gave it the Voodoo Labs seal of approval, after asking me to move one part of the cable away from my metal rack: “At least 2cm of distance, please.”
Beautify your ducts
My wife mocked the cables mercilessly. Marcia has a master’s degree in English literature and thus has access to a seemingly endless supply of fresh-baked metaphors and idioms. “Little, toy-scale electrical power lines! Play-Doh hair-extruding machines!”
Let’s leave it at this: if you have a significant other who is not keen on seeing the wires, then these cables are utterly inappropriate for your home.
But as I said, I think they look exceptionally cool. The separators and risers are clearly cast with great precision, and are so light in weight that it seems impossible for them to be metal. And man-oh-man, are they conversation starters! To reiterate: I think these cables look boss, and would be happy to have them in my system just for their appearance.
The Voodoo Labs cables were fed exclusively by a Hegel Music Systems H30A amplifier. At the business end, the speakers were my own Estelon YBs; and for a couple of days, I heard them with the imposing Børresen X6 loudspeakers (review forthcoming).
A witch never gets caught
Cable swaps are generally an eye-rolling process. Yank the old ones out, hook up the new ones, and sit back for a couple of weeks to get a feel for them. That couple of weeks serves two purposes. First off, I find high-end audio of all types hates to be moved around. It never sounds right when it’s first installed. It sulks for a spell. Over the first couple of weeks, it chills itself out, relaxes, and becomes accustomed to its new surroundings. Oh, I know—I’m anthropomorphizing. But that’s how it seems to me, and you’re reading my feelings here, so grant me that liberty.
More importantly, though, it generally takes me at least that long to get a handle on how a cable sounds. The differences are subtle. Over time, the small differences stack up, become more obvious, and—holy hell—do they become important.
It only took a day or two after installing the Witchcraft cables for me to notice one very important difference in my system. Images became larger, more corporeal, rounder, and more vivid. This was most noticeable on solo vocals with a clear center image.
I’m ready to make a confession, one I thought I’d never have to make. Since I added the Meitner Audio MA3 into my system, I’ve been using Roon to stream music more than I’ve been playing LPs while I’m writing. I think part of my resistance to adding digital in my main system was that I was worried about just this sort of thing. I wanted to keep using LPs, despite having to interrupt my writing to flip sides every 18 minutes or so.
Yet there I was, listening to Bill Callahan singing “From the Rivers to the Ocean” from Woke on a Whaleheart (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Drag City Records / Tidal). I’ve been on a Bill Callahan kick lately, his flat intonation yanking my chain in much the same way as that of Howe Gelb and William Elliott Whitmore.
Callahan is the focused star of this track (I’m not keen on his backing band). With the Voodoo Labs cables running the show, his voice was more solid, more real than I’ve ever heard. Physically larger than I’m used to, was this image. This was a very good start.
Speaking of Whitmore, I’d gotten a similar dosage of outstanding imaging in two interesting, contrasting ways. From Animals in the Dark (16/44.1 FLAC, Anti- Records / Epitaph Records / Tidal), I cued up “Mutiny” and found the militaristic snare drum sharing space with Whitmore’s voice. It sounded like he was actually playing that snare, which attacked its way forward in a manner very much akin to that of a live instrument.
Back to “Mutiny,” and that whomping kick drum. It might actually be a larger drum, some kind of kettledrum, maybe? Regardless, the rich, round, whomping attack started low down in physical space and rolled upward, and for the first time I noted that this big-ass instrument was in front of Whitmore, leading him in a logical parade, or some kind of march.
So we’re talking superb imaging here. And this was only in the first few days. I went on vacation for a week, and my wife’s friend house-sat for us while we were gone. Lorie didn’t listen to music, but she did watch a bunch of movies, so the Witchcraft cables had loosened up and settled in by the time I’d gotten back.
Feeling slightly guilty, I fired up the VPI and committed myself to playing LPs for the balance of the review. Still running the Charisma Audio Signature Two cartridge, I used Astor Piazzolla’s Tango: Zero Hour (LP, Pangaea PAN-42138) to reorient myself. This was a clever, pat-myself-on-the-back reviewer move, given that I’d listened to this album extensively when I was reviewing that cartridge. With the Witchcrafts in my system, the overall feeling of soundstaging and imaging moved more toward the center, but was more physically detached from the speakers. Listening to the interplay between Pablo Ziegler’s piano and Piazzolla’s bandoneon in “Concierto para quinteto,” I could hear the two instruments layered on top of each other: still discrete, stable, and incredibly tactile.
There was still plenty of depth to the soundscape of the track. As I changed my focus, I could peel back layers, like picking at a fresh croissant with a steak knife. The little taps and plinks at the end of the track gained a feeling of dynamic precision, and I found my eyes flitting left and right as my mind insisted that I focus on the sounds.
When I first saw the skinny, punky little wires that made up each leg of the Witchcraft’s conductors, I found myself wondering how they’d handle the bass. Surely we need forearm-sized wires to transmit man-sized bass? Well, not so much, I guess. Via the Witchcraft cables, the bass was tight, accurate, and immensely satisfying. Switching gears, I threw Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden (LP, Parlophone PCSDX 105) on the ’table. If the bass isn’t right, this album can annoy the living hell out of me. The whole thing rides on the buildup of tension, the increasing abrasiveness leading up to an almost coital release. But it’s not possible to let go of that tension if the low end doesn’t hold up. The fretless bass that mumbles to itself in “The Rainbow” had the correct amount of growl, and—once I focused on it—the appropriate size and position in space. Likewise, the piano that intones several deep, ominous notes in the break—huge, juicy, and satisfying.
Sticking with Spirit of Eden, I noted silky, refined, slightly restrained high frequencies, of which there are plenty on this album. The slashing, abrasive guitar that builds up on “Eden” had the requisite bite and full extension, but was perhaps just a touch more listenable than it should be. That said, I found I could listen into that guitar, hear more of the ringing overtones and harmonics than I’m used to. An extremely fair tradeoff, and an exemplary top-end performance.
Let the right one in
I spent a while comparing the Witchcraft cables to the Crystal Cable Art Series Monets that I reviewed last year. There were two big differences without even listening to them. First off, the Monets are nearly twice the price of the Voodoo Labs cables. That’s a big money difference, but let’s be real here—anyone considering speaker cables that retail for five figures has kinda misplaced the concept of value, so I don’t see that price really matters here.
Of more import, I think, is the appearance of these two wildly different speaker cables. The Voodoo Labs cables are a total mad-professor, arcing Tesla-coil conglomeration. But as I stated earlier, I think this approach is a glorious insanity. In the opposite corner, we have the slinky, sexy, low-profile, sparkly Crystal Cables, from which you could cut out a chunk and make a passable anniversary bracelet for the wife. The differences are stark, and I think the appearance of these two cables could likely drive a purchasing decision more than their sound quality—or is that just the cynic in me talking?
But how they sound is what’s important to us savants, right? As I stated in my review, I found the Monets to be wildly open and transparent, and to have excellent soundstage depth. The Witchcrafts also did that open-sounding thing, pretty much on par with the Monets, but it was in imaging that the Witchcrafts differed from the Crystal Cables. The Voodoo Labs cables portrayed images with uncanny realism—incredible solidity, with rock-solid positioning.
On the other hand, the Monets presented slightly more depth to the soundstage. Images weren’t as tangible, but they were better layered, with an increased sense of delicacy in the front-to-back department.
Which cable I preferred depended on the speakers I was using at the time. Running the Estelon YBs, the Witchcrafts pulled ahead, firming up the center image with no loss of depth. Feeding the Børresens, it went the other way. These huge, imposing speakers already snap a hyperrealistic lateral soundstage, and the Crystal Cables locked in just a tiny bit more depth to the presentation.
Either way, either speaker, I’d be happy to keep the Witchcraft cables in my system, given their crazy-fun architecture, excellent sound, and reasonable (I did a bit of an eye-roll there) price.
A witch is born out of the true hungers of her time
The Voodoo Labs Witchcraft speaker cable system isn’t for everyone. That’s a redundancy of the highest order, I know. But this statement is true beyond the concept of a set of speaker cables that costs almost ten thousand dollars.
The appearance of this cable is going to polarize audiophiles like nothing else out there. It’s wispy, yet it takes up a fair bit of room. It’s delicate in appearance, even though the grids and risers are extremely tough. And in use, it needs to be set up in an area where it won’t get knocked around, as the risers tip quite easily if they get bumped.
Conceptually, the Witchcraft cables go against much of the popular, accepted science that floats around audiophile circles. Thin cables. Olde tyme insulation. Bare-wire terminations, for Christ’s sake! But having conversed with Geschke, and thinking about it afterward, these choices make a whole lot of sense, given what a wire needs to do to carry an electromagnetic signal.
The final word, the last thing—these cables sounded good. Really good. That’s really where this review needs to end. It’s where I should have started in Munich, but I let my desire for a quick slam dunk at Voodoo Labs’ expense get in the way. I really shouldn’t have done that.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Analog sources: VPI Prime Signature turntable; EAT Jo N°8, DS Audio DS 003, and Charisma Audio Signature Two cartridges.
- Digital sources: Logitech Squeezebox Touch, Meitner Audio MA3.
- Phono preamplifiers: Aqvox Phono 2 CI, iFi Audio iPhono 3 Black Label, Hegel Music Systems V10, EMM Labs DS-EQ1, Meitner DS-EQ2.
- Preamplifiers: Sonic Frontiers SFL-2, Hegel Music Systems P30A.
- Power amplifier: Hegel Music Systems H30A.
- Integrated amplifiers: Hegel Music Systems H120, Eico HF-81.
- Speakers: Focus Audio FP60 BE, Estelon YB, Aurelia Cerica XL, Totem Acoustic Sky Towers, Børresen X6.
- Speaker cables: Audience Au24 SX, Nordost Tyr 2, Crystal Cable Art Series Monet.
- Interconnects: Audience Au24 SX, Furutech Ag-16, Nordost Tyr 2, Crystal Cable Diamond Series 2.
- Power cords: Audience FrontRow, Nordost Vishnu.
- Power conditioner: Quantum QBase QB8 Mk II.
- Accessories: Little Fwend tonearm lift, VPI Cyclone record-cleaning machine, Furutech Destat III.
Voodoo Labs Witchcraft Speaker Cable
Price: $9600 per 2m pair, $1000 each additional 0.5m.
Warranty: Two years, parts and labor.
Voodoo Labs
GP Creative Berlin GmbH Studio Nord
Oderfelder Str. 21
D20149 Hamburg
Germany
Phone: +49 40485535
Email: info@voodoolabs.org
Website: voodoolabs.org
