Cardas Audio Factory Tour
by Todd Warnke

Windswept, rugged and rock-strewn, Oregon’s southern coast is prettier than the state tourism board can describe, proof of which is the lack of crowds. Of course, their efforts are seriously hampered by the fact that you can’t get there from here, at least not without serious effort. When Robin and I booked our flight for the trip from Denver, we had two options: flying into San Francisco and driving north 400 miles, or flying into Portland and driving south 350 miles. Since San Francisco is the coolest city in the world, we chose the longer route.

Leaving San Francisco and heading up the Sonoma Valley and on into Mendocino is, for an oenophile, bliss. We found grapes, wineries and bed-and-breakfasts as far as the eye can see. After 100 miles of grape bliss, the road takes you into Redwood National Park, home of the largest living things on the planet, not to mention some of the most beautiful. Once there, you must stop and see Paul Bunyon and Babe the Blue Ox and tour the Trees of Mystery. To complete the tourist kitsch, we drove through a redwood tree before heading north.

At the park’s north end, the highway runs down to the ocean. The last 125 miles into Bandon, the home of Cardas Audio, are breathtaking. The coast range rises to about 4000 feet in a matter of miles and frames your passenger-side view all the way up the coast. The shore rises and falls, at times opening to flat farming valleys or pinching you between 500-foot cliffs and the ocean. When the shore is too narrow for a road, you find yourself 500 feet above it, a literal stone's throw from the waves. And about every 25 miles you cross a small bay or river mouth, most of which include a town, harbor and warm, friendly people.

A lovely town with wonderful waterfront shops and restaurants, Bandon itself is well preserved for a place that has been around for 125 years. This is probably due to the fact that it has burned down twice, most recently in 1932. A little port town of 2600 people, according to George Cardas, the number has changed little since 1875. The town lies in sight of Cape Blanco, the westernmost point of land in the lower 48 states. Because Cape Blanco is the first land mass for 8000 miles, the wind howls often and packs a real punch. Fortunately, the terrain is rolling as it leads up to the coast-range foothills. This offers pockets of respite as well as odd microclimates. Temperature differences of 30-40 degrees within a mile are common.

The Cardas Audio factory is housed in an unassuming building just to the east of the only stoplight on Bandon’s south side. The first of the building’s two floors houses the office, shipping and receiving, some inventory and most of the construction workstations. The second floor holds additional construction workstations, but inventory occupies most of it. A relaxed air of dedication and energy surrounds the factory. A potbelly stove in the assembly area provides heat, and best of all, Speck, a Jack Russell Terrier, supervises everyone.

After walking around Cardas Audio, you can see why they need so much space. With five people building wire all day, there is a lot to do. When we were there, the shipping area held boxes destined for the Far East, Europe and all over North America. The first-floor inventory room was stocked with speaker wire covering the entire product line and in quantities that could lash together the trans-Pacific fleet anchored just off-shore. The second-floor inventory was filled with connectors and small-signal wire in numbers that belie the industry’s fate. If there is a slump in high-end audio, Cardas isn’t seeing it.

Watching the assembly crew (with music constantly playing in the background) made me thankful for my job. I have to worry about installing operating systems and terminating SCSI cards, but that’s child’s play compared to installing connectors and terminating Golden Section wire.

Speaking of those skilled assemblers, when Cardas relocated from California about six years ago, the company’s entire staff, minus one, followed. Since a bad economy did not spur the move, and the change couldn’t have been more radical for the people involved, this, more than anything else I saw at the factory, described the family attitude and care that Cardas Audio takes in everything it does.

Still, after wandering around the plant, I did notice some missing things: a workshop, design studio and skunkworks. When I mentioned this, George took us out to his house, which, from the way most of the employees dropped by during the day, seems to be the real focal point of the company.

Let’s start with that skunkworks.

A table, about eight feet by four feet, sat in the middle of the room covered two feet deep in speaker wire and interconnects, not a single piece of which carried the Cardas name. Each one had been listened to, and, more importantly, measured.

George uses a Tektronics TDS 350 'scope and a Muse amp (tethered to an API Power Wedge) to measure various electrical properties. The importance of shielding was as impressive as anything he showed me. I’ve commented in several reviews how here in Aurora, Colorado, I face an incredibly contaminated environment due to the proximity of Buckley AFB. Due to Bandon’s geography, you would not think the issue to be the same; after all they are on the edge of world. But without boosting the 'scope’s scale to absurd levels, RFI was readily visible on every unshielded IC we tested.

Over the course of the next hour, George walked me through a clinic on cables. We ran through a dozen cables and took snapshots of each. While only one or two grossly altered the signal, all showed various amounts of frequency-response and electrical-phase shift. While we spent much of the time with a boosted-view scale to emphasize the differences, it was quite obvious that the complex interaction of LCR parameters and cable geometry result in anything but simple and smooth signal passage. The need to design audio wires using comprehensive measuring techniques as well as listening tests to truly understand and control the effects of each design parameter was equally obvious.

After the lab, we went to the recording studios. That’s right, studios -- three, as a matter of fact. One studio is actually the main Cardas listening room and has been carefully sculpted to golden-ratio dimensions, giving it a very balanced sound. The second houses a baby grand piano just waiting for someone far more skilled than I to play there, while the third studio is a more resonant room that also sports a hot tub. This last one is where Cardas conducts most of his sessions, and from listening to his masters, it’s easy to hear why as the sound is superb combination of the direct and radiated. At the center of all of these rooms is the mastering studio. With Rowland electronics and Merlin speakers, the system therein is very revealing, yet tonally rich, not to mention the best-sounding mastering room in the US.

Also in the center of these rooms is one part of the Cardas vinyl collection. This hallway collection numbers in the thousands and includes everything from Edison cylinders to recent remasters. The rest of the collection is back in the main listening room and is a floor-to-ceiling, three-wall affair. There is the odd CD lying around, in fact we listened to Tom Waits’ Mule Variations to warm the main system up, but the bulk of the listening at Casa de Cardas is, undoubtedly, vinyl. And I heard why.

The main system uses the La Luce turntable that Cardas imports with a Cardas Heart cartridge (CD source is by Muse), a Rowland phono stage, the Wavestream amps that Cardas helped design, and a highly modified pair of Magnepan speakers. Rich yet intricately detailed, dynamic as an F1 Ferrari but as smooth as, well, real music, the sound was so vivid and natural that this system ranks as one of the best, if not the best, I’ve ever heard. It is balanced so well that it would work as an alternate mastering system, and yet, listener fatigue is impossible.

Still, all this -- the factory, the lab, the recording studios and the vinyl collection -- stops short of defining either Cardas Audio or Cardas the man.

One facet of Cardas can be seen back in town. Bandon, like most coastal towns in Oregon, has seen better days. The old resource-use and extraction industries of salmon fishing and logging were over-subscribed and are now tightly regulated to allow for re-growth (Robin and I used to live in Oregon and are quite familiar with the economics of logging and fishing). This is the major reason why Bandon is still the size it was 125 years ago. With this stagnation and the lacking tourist trade, local tax revenues are low, which significantly affects the schools. Five years ago, Cardas Audio began to contribute to the local high-school music program. The result has been a jazz band that attends and has won state and national competitions. Cardas Audio has also rallied support for several college scholarships.

Others facets can be discovered back at the house. Earlier I mentioned that when Cardas Audio moved to Oregon, the employees came with and that the Cardas home was as much a part of the company as the factory. This spirit of family pervades the entire organization. Dinner in the Cardas home can function as a board meeting, a roast of the Don Rickles variety, or an ad-campaign meeting, since nearly everyone attends.

It was during dinner that Cardas offered the best explanation of his philosophy. He refers to his products as filling a "seekers" niche. Since the Cardas name is ubiquitous in high-end audio, particularly in regard to connectors, this sounds a bit odd. One thing that you don’t have to do in the high end is seek out the Cardas name. But when he expands on his statement, many things snap into focus.

Let’s start with the ads. When you first encounter a Cardas ad, it fails to make sense. And after thinking about it, it makes even less sense, at least in conventional terms. For example, take his recent ad titled, "Cardas in Austria." Even after studying it for ten minutes, all I had were questions. Are those folks returning from a day of harvesting wire in the mountains, or are they about to yodel the praises of Cardas? Is the ad a fashion statement about what the well-dressed cable guy wears to work? Where’s the product? In fact, what is the product? And why does the man on the right look just like my dad?

According to Cardas, the reason why his ads look as they do is because all the hype, specs (the Cardas wire we tested in the lab was easily the best objective performer and would serve as the base of all a spec-oriented-companies' ads) and talk of a magic bullet to cure system ills are counter-productive. True music lovers want to know how a product sounds in their system, but no ad can deliver that. By putting his name out there instead of selling, Cardas hopes to keep people aware of the line; then those who have an interest can seek out his products. Also, the oddness of the ads themselves works as a filter. The tweak-a-week audiophool is likely to miss them completely, thus missing Cardas as well. While such turn-and-burn purchasers may generate short-term sales, they fail to establish a long-term relationship, interest or customer, each of which is more important to Cardas Audio than short-term sales growth.

As for the product, as Cardas explains it, it’s music -- not specs, not wire, and most certainly not hype. While just about any audio company will lay the same claim, few walk the walk like Cardas Audio. Cardas can take this enlightened approach to his cable line because he has so many other areas of market support. His line of connectors is recognized as the best-sounding in audio. Cardas also manufactures a quad-eutectic solder that offers superb sound and ease of use. And he supplies OEM wire to many companies in the industry. Because Cardas Audio products are so widely recognized and used by the industry itself, the company’s bond with music is reinforced. Why else would so many audio companies place part of their sound in Cardas’s hands?

This defines the Cardas Audio that I observed. There is nothing short-term about the man or the company. Both lead rounded lives; the company exists to help its customers, employees and community, while George is a champion sailor as well as an auto racer. He also has purchased a parcel of logged and abandoned wasteland near his house and is reclaiming it. His wife, a wonderful, patient and engaging person, is a teacher, pilot and steadying hand on the tiller. Both the company and the family care as much for tomorrow as for today. The Cardas atmosphere maintains a sense of calm and purpose alongside ease and playfulness. No amount of success can produce this; Cardas Audio discovered it through a search for joy and beauty. Those who have listened carefully to Cardas wire know that this describes their sound to a T.

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To find out more about Cardas Audio
visit their website at www.cardas.com