DENVER (PTA) — David Cope of Old Forge Marketing has recently attained the title and responsibility as the new American distributor for Luna Cables of Canada. We sat down for a few (relaxing) minutes at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2019 to recall how David came to discover and eventually fall in love with the Luna Cable brand.

The Story

David Cope had been a long time fan and re-seller of Auditorium 23 cables, for which I can’t blame him. David’s show systems always performed well beyond expectations using Auditorium 23, and more often than most exhibitors, his exhibits always seemed to convey a sense of synergy usually found in well curated home systems.

However, the Auditorium 23 product line is only comprised of interconnects and speaker cables. So when a retail customer would ask David for a “full-systems-worth” of cables, he was left partially empty-handed. The Auditorium 23 cables are amazing, don’t me wrong, and yes they only “make what they make”, but only at one level, and one price. I bestow them many kudos for a “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” mindset to production. However, not every problem calls for a hammer.

For David Cope, there needed to be something in his stable of brands with more range and flexibility, a cable line able to handle a more diverse set of customer needs. David had read about Luna Cables in a European publication (for shame, as I thought he only read PTA), from a writer whose personal taste much aligned with his own. David knew it was time to reach out to Luna Cable of Canada, and so he then ordered enough cables to completely wire an entire system. The level of cable David had chosen was “Orange“, the second tier from the bottom.

Luna Cable tiers their products by color, starting with “Gris” at the bottom, followed by “Orange“, “Mauve”, “Rouge”, and “Noir” color-delineations as you go up the quality and price scale. Each level (color) of Luna Cable has its own specialty and range of connectivity options. Luna Cable’s “Gris” line for example, only comprises of: RCA/XLR, Speaker, USB, and AC Cord options. While the “Orange” line is made up of: RCA, XLR, Speaker, USB, AC Cord, Ethernet, Jumpers, and a Moving Coil Step-Up Transformer​ (SUT). Terminations are all cryogenically treated and vary from spades to bananas. Connector types are all Switchcraft throughout every tier. Small aluminum blocks at various cable division points help with durability and alignment. Each set of cables comes in a natural cotton bag for protection and easy transportation (if toting cables is your thing).

While we’re speaking of cotton, we should talk about Luna Cables choice of using woven natural cotton jacketing on all of their cables. All cotton jacketing is dyed by hand in the Luna Cable factory. Through Luna Cable’s extensive and lengthy research and development process in developing the cable line, they found that all man-made materials used in R&D were exhibiting (and contributing) too much vibrational noise and interference into the test systems. From that point on, it was a cotton world for Luna Cable.

Internally all Luna Cables use tinned-copper for signal transmission. The reason for tinning is two fold: first for the reliability of the cable against oxidation, and second for reduction skin effect problems.

 

The Sound

(according to David Cope)

The day for switching out cables had arrived, but before completing a system tear-down and re-wiring. David settled in for a routine listen through his existing cabling-hodgepodge that went through all the normal steps and paces of serious analytical habits. After that listening session was complete, David quickly made the changes over to Luna Cables throughout the whole system and dove in right away.

David had been told that Luna Cable “Orange” will sound “fine” or “good enough” out of the box (or bag in this case), but “not to worry as they will break-in after 120-hours of energizing.” However, fresh off the brown truck (UPS) and right out of the natural cotton bag, the new Luna Cables were mystifyingly good in his stereo system. For the fairest of comparisons, David had chosen the “Orange” level from Luna Cables as it was in the same competing price range to compare with Auditorium 23 two cable offerings.

For David’s purposes the Luna Cables didn’t need to sound better than the Auditorium 23, just as good for the money would have sufficed, as they only needed to offer more options when it came to cabling choices. However, the new Luna Cable “Orange” cables were not just as good — no — for David’s taste, the Luna Cables were a lot better. David described, the sound differences as such: “There was more detail [right out of the box] but not in an all-singing, all-dancing, jazz-hands-in-your-face kind of way. It was more ‘Hey, there’s more to this harmonic structure’ than I’ve been hearing over the last two years.” to which he continued, “It was more power and more flavor right out of the box.”

The Distribution

Those sonic impressions stated above are exactly the feedback David Cope recited to Luna Cables executives over the phone. Needless to say, they were happy to hear that kind of feedback, but it also kinda left those executives speechless in thought. A pause in the conversation. More silence. Then a voice on the Luna Cables end said to David, “We notice you are also an importer and distributor on your website.”

It was at this point that Luna Cables and Old Forge began the relationship upon where Luna Cables, now takes on the American soil. An odd but noteworthy detail I picked up is that Luna Cables already has a relatively large distributor and dealer network going in Europe. Which in recent years has helped Luna Cables scale their production to meet the next market challenges and expand into America proper.

David Cope of Old Forge is now a full-line distributor of the Luna Cable products. Pricing information can be found at the bottom of the Luna Cable website, in the lower-right-corner.