Ruling against Chord for cable advertizing

[John49]

As a man who has Chord Sarum Tuned Aray cables coming out of his ears (!), I would just like to say that I auditioned every Sarum cable for a specific use before purchase. I am very happy with them.

[BlueFox]

The ruling was in regard to their Ethernet cable. Did their Ethernet cable really make that obvious a difference over a regular CAT6 cable?

[Glisse]

Originally Posted by BlueFox

The ruling was in regard to their Ethernet cable. Did their Ethernet cable really make that obvious a difference over a regular CAT6 cable?

Was it you who made the complaint?

[kingm88]

I have tried a few of the older Chord interconnect and speaker cables. I did not like the Chord signature speaker cable at all. It sounded dull and lacked sparkle as well as being stiff and cumbersome but when I tried the cheaper Chord Epic, this worked much better in my system.
So it goes to show more expensive cables do not always make an improvement.
I'm not saying that their products are bad but they seem to come up with their own technical terms that's slightly baffling.
Also when a company starts selling a 1 metre interconnect for over 5k I just can't take them seriously anymore.
I have also tried some handmade pure silver interconnects from a non branded maker and was surprised how good it sounded at the fraction of the cost of branded makes and build quality was just as good.
As long as the materials and construction methods are sound then you should have a good cable.
When you realise how low the actual cost is to make a decent cable then I find it difficult to be sucked into all the marketing hype.

[cleeds]

Originally Posted by Alki

... They could go after almost all cable companies as most claims are very subjective ...

If you read the ruling carefully, it doesn't appear that ASA objected to Chord's subjective claims. Rather, ASA faulted the company for stating subjective observations as actual objective fact: "The ASA considered that the claims in the ad were presented as objective ..."

Had those claims been clearly stated as subjective opinion, it appears that the agency would not have ruled against Chord.

That would be easy to workaround. For example, at least based on my interpretation of the ruling, Chord could advertise, "Many listeners report that connecting a Tuned ARAY cable to the streaming device will have a dramatic effect." The objective claim in that statement - that this is what listeners report - can be substantiated based on the information Chord already provided.