Cables & Wires

The Vivilink 3, our third major HDMI cable design upgrade, carries our minimalist design approach much further than our highly successful earlier designs—while at the same time upgrading the cable's bandwidth to HDMI 2.0 and 4K speeds.

The festive-looking copper foil inside a skinny baggie are Clearview ribbon interconnects. It took a lot of work for InSound and Mapleshade to improve upon our original, widely-praised ultra thin twisted-wire design. The perplexed look on your face will evaporate the instant you hear the excitement our ribbon interconnects add to your music: startling energy, all kinds of new instrumental details, thunderous bass, and remarkably articulated, endless treble. Theres much more to our interconnects than meets the eye. Their conductors are high purity, proprietary metallurgy copper ribbons -- much thinner than any existing cable (including competing flat-wire designs). The insulation is a super-thin polymer sheath for lowest dielectric absorption. Each interconnect is given three separate chemical and electromagnetic treatments. Our proprietary RCA plugs are the best-sounding plugs in high-end audio (including BNCs and XLRs).

The digital music world is awash in bad-sounding Toslink cables and pitifully few that sound even acceptable by Mapleshade standards. When we found ourselves in serious need of a really good Toslink connection for our studio, we embarked on a lengthy set of listening experiments to develop an optical cable that could live up to our demanding expectations. Several hundred tests later, we arrived at the Clearlink Optical design which we guarantee to sound better than any high end Toslink available today — regardless of price. 30-Day Money Back In addition to components where Toslink is the only connection option, we recommend the Clearlink Optical in the following applications: 1. Use the Clearlink Optical to carry digital audio from your cable box to receiver to get sound significantly better than HDMI audio or coax (analog) audio—and particularly so for long runs. 2. Connecting your Apple TV audio using the Clearlink Optical instead of HDMI or WiFi wireless will be a major upgrade in sound quality for home theater or two channel. 3. The Clearlink Optical carrying digital music streams from your Mac desktop, laptop, iMac or Mac Mini to a DAC sounds even better than using any USB cables (even our Clearlink USB) and way better than the analog Headphone Out jack on Macs. NOTE: unbeknownst to many Mac owners, every Mac Headphone Out doubles as a digital SPDIF Out connection for your DAC or receiver, requiring only that you insert a Mini Toslink plug rather than the standard, larger Toslink termination (we offer a Mini Toslink option); the computer recognizes the mini Toslink and turns on the optical transmitter. 4. In situations where our Digital Ribbon Interconnects are too delicate or shorter-than-needed, the Clearlink Optical is an exceptional-sounding alternative. Though our Toslink cable is very thin, it is robustly contructed. You can walk on the cable if necessary and it is nearly cat-proof.

If you've tried changing wires but never hurt much difference, there's good reason. Virtually all speaker cables—audiophile or "off the spool"—incorporate the same design mistakes: overly thick, multi-stranded wire conductors insulated with excessively thick plastic. There are as many variations of this mistaken recipe as there are brands. But when you compare them, you just hear different flavors of flawed sound. Excessively fat wires muddy the bass, roll off the treble, and bury the midrange detail of any speaker. Stranded conductors always degrade stereo imaging and transparency. Thicker insulation makes speakers sound sluggish and smeared. Mapleshade speaker wires look and sound so radically different because they implement the results of our exhaustive independent music listening tests, not compromised by preconceptions. We use optimally thin, ultra high-purity, single strand copper drawn, silver-plated and heat-treated to our specs—then hyper-twisted for unmatched field cancellation. Our proprietary polymer insulation is ultra-thin (less than .0002'') and uniquely low-loss. The result is a range of reasonably priced speaker cables with radically better clarity, detail, and dynamics than any conventional or high end cable.