entrope
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2008
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Heya all,
I'm new to this forum and have wanted to make this post for quite some time, however due to my busy schedule I had only been able to get off my bum a moment ago and finally pen out this thread regarding Ecosse Cables.
Allow me to begin with an E-Mail I had received from Ecosse. Back in December I had asked Ecosse where their cables were designed and manufactured and this was their response; "Ecosse cables are designed and manufactured in our factory in uk. The materials are sourced from all over the world" (unedited quote).
It is perfectly understandable to me that raw materials these days come from pretty much everywhere... so I have positive understanding towards any company which obtains raw materials from another country (China, for example) but does design, processing, assembly, etc, back in their factory wherever it may be (in the case of Ecosse, they claim it to be in the United Kingdom).
However, I am beginning to have doubts with respect to the claims which have been made by Ecosse.
Late last year I had purchased one of their newer speaker cables - the Ecosse MS4.7 Bi-Wire Speaker Cable (you may gather more details about this cable here and for your own reference you can access the main website for Ecosse here).
Not long after my purchase of this over-1,000 US$ cable I had decided to do my own personal modifications to the cable as I found that their (Ecosse's) build quality of this particular cable was far from brilliant (this is the first time I ever had build quality issues with cables I had purchased from Ecosse). Part of what I wanted to do with the cable involved the removal of the main sheath which was covering the two cables within the bi-wire set, and this is when things started to get somewhat "interesting".
(After I first cut the sheath open near the beginning of the cable)
Note that I do not have any photos of the cable prior to my cutting-up job as I was originally not expecting to take any. The surprises which I uncovered were what originally prompted me to take my camera out and start going happy on the shutter-release button
...
The first thing I noticed was this; the blue bit at the right on the cable stopper which reads "NeoTech" was originally covered up with an Ecosse sticker, the NeoTech logo was only visible after the sticker was removed. NeoTech if memory serves me right is also a audio cable manufacturing company (based in Taiwan though) which also does "single crystal copper" cable, a cable processing technique also used by Ecosse (though Ecosse calls it "monocrystal").
My first thoughts were, "Okay, it's just on the cable stopper... so maybe Ecosse had simply gotten their cable stoppers from NeoTech. Time to move on and see what else I can uncover..." - So this was when I decided to fully strip the outer sheath away from the full run of cable, and uncovered this:
(Note the text "SGSCC-1" on the black cable)
I had then noticed that the black cable contained zero Ecosse branding. All it had was the text "SGSCC-1 SINGLE CRYSTAL COPPER - 99.999%"... Kinda odd I thought, since I've never bumped into a cable manufacturer who fails to include branding on their cables. So out of my curiosity I had fired up Google and started searching on the mystery "SGSCC-1" text which I found on the cable. Lo-and-Behold, a good number of China-based results were the first to show up on Google... and eventually, I stumbled into this link.
-> Description: mono crystal Copper Wire
-> Model No.: SGSCC-1
-> Brand Name: Everyoung
-> Country of Origin: China
This has prompted me to believe that Ecosse pretty much doesn't even design nor manufacture their cables (or at least "some" of their cables) in-house back in the UK at all but rather just purchase their cables in bulk from Everyoung and slap some cheap sheath over the cable with "Ecosse" written on it. And as stated previously, the fact that the cable stoppers are branded as NeoTech doesn't exactly instill a lot more confidence either.
By this time, I was a little ticked off that Ecosse may have possibly lied to me, so off I went to inspect the cable with a little more detail to reveal where the other olive coloured cable came from...
(Yeah, at least this cable appears to be from Ecosse... though the wrong one)
If you had read the Ecosse literature about my MS4.7 speaker cable here you'd have noticed that Ecosse advertises the cable of comprising of both a stranded (Ecosse MS2.4) and solid core (MS2.15) cable. No-where was an Ecosse MS2.3 cable mentioned, but here I am looking at one on my table-top. I could only assume that the thick black Everyoung SGSCC-1 cable was meant to be Ecosse's so-called "MS2.4" cable, and therefore the olive cable should have been a MS2.15 solid-core cable, but it wasn't... rather it was a MS2.3 stranded conductor cable.
To confirm my doubts, I had actually cut open the two (both the black and olive) cables, and yes, both cables were stranded conductors, no solid-core cable as per Ecosse's cable literature was to be found (according to Ecosse; at least one of the two cables in the Ecosse MS4.7 Bi-Wire Speaker Cable set are supposed to have been a solid core conductor).
So, lets come up with a short Ecosse Cable FAQ checklist now...
-> Ecosse cables designed in the UK? Maybe, but unlikely.
-> Ecosse cables made in the UK? Unlikely.
-> Ecosse cables made as per product literature? Definitely not.
The fact that the black cable (as visible in the second photo above) has "SGSCC-1" written on it (an Everyoung product) and absolutely no Ecosse branding on it simply makes the cable shout out "Made in China"... and this has caused my confidence in Ecosse Cables to crash down to the ocean floor.
Does anyone share the same opinion as my self with regards to what I had uncovered? Feel free to share your opinions, I'd be more than interested to have a look at the point of view of others in this forum.
I'm new to this forum and have wanted to make this post for quite some time, however due to my busy schedule I had only been able to get off my bum a moment ago and finally pen out this thread regarding Ecosse Cables.
Allow me to begin with an E-Mail I had received from Ecosse. Back in December I had asked Ecosse where their cables were designed and manufactured and this was their response; "Ecosse cables are designed and manufactured in our factory in uk. The materials are sourced from all over the world" (unedited quote).
It is perfectly understandable to me that raw materials these days come from pretty much everywhere... so I have positive understanding towards any company which obtains raw materials from another country (China, for example) but does design, processing, assembly, etc, back in their factory wherever it may be (in the case of Ecosse, they claim it to be in the United Kingdom).
However, I am beginning to have doubts with respect to the claims which have been made by Ecosse.
Late last year I had purchased one of their newer speaker cables - the Ecosse MS4.7 Bi-Wire Speaker Cable (you may gather more details about this cable here and for your own reference you can access the main website for Ecosse here).
Not long after my purchase of this over-1,000 US$ cable I had decided to do my own personal modifications to the cable as I found that their (Ecosse's) build quality of this particular cable was far from brilliant (this is the first time I ever had build quality issues with cables I had purchased from Ecosse). Part of what I wanted to do with the cable involved the removal of the main sheath which was covering the two cables within the bi-wire set, and this is when things started to get somewhat "interesting".
(After I first cut the sheath open near the beginning of the cable)
Note that I do not have any photos of the cable prior to my cutting-up job as I was originally not expecting to take any. The surprises which I uncovered were what originally prompted me to take my camera out and start going happy on the shutter-release button
...The first thing I noticed was this; the blue bit at the right on the cable stopper which reads "NeoTech" was originally covered up with an Ecosse sticker, the NeoTech logo was only visible after the sticker was removed. NeoTech if memory serves me right is also a audio cable manufacturing company (based in Taiwan though) which also does "single crystal copper" cable, a cable processing technique also used by Ecosse (though Ecosse calls it "monocrystal").
My first thoughts were, "Okay, it's just on the cable stopper... so maybe Ecosse had simply gotten their cable stoppers from NeoTech. Time to move on and see what else I can uncover..." - So this was when I decided to fully strip the outer sheath away from the full run of cable, and uncovered this:
(Note the text "SGSCC-1" on the black cable)
I had then noticed that the black cable contained zero Ecosse branding. All it had was the text "SGSCC-1 SINGLE CRYSTAL COPPER - 99.999%"... Kinda odd I thought, since I've never bumped into a cable manufacturer who fails to include branding on their cables. So out of my curiosity I had fired up Google and started searching on the mystery "SGSCC-1" text which I found on the cable. Lo-and-Behold, a good number of China-based results were the first to show up on Google... and eventually, I stumbled into this link.
-> Description: mono crystal Copper Wire
-> Model No.: SGSCC-1
-> Brand Name: Everyoung
-> Country of Origin: China
This has prompted me to believe that Ecosse pretty much doesn't even design nor manufacture their cables (or at least "some" of their cables) in-house back in the UK at all but rather just purchase their cables in bulk from Everyoung and slap some cheap sheath over the cable with "Ecosse" written on it. And as stated previously, the fact that the cable stoppers are branded as NeoTech doesn't exactly instill a lot more confidence either.
By this time, I was a little ticked off that Ecosse may have possibly lied to me, so off I went to inspect the cable with a little more detail to reveal where the other olive coloured cable came from...
(Yeah, at least this cable appears to be from Ecosse... though the wrong one)
If you had read the Ecosse literature about my MS4.7 speaker cable here you'd have noticed that Ecosse advertises the cable of comprising of both a stranded (Ecosse MS2.4) and solid core (MS2.15) cable. No-where was an Ecosse MS2.3 cable mentioned, but here I am looking at one on my table-top. I could only assume that the thick black Everyoung SGSCC-1 cable was meant to be Ecosse's so-called "MS2.4" cable, and therefore the olive cable should have been a MS2.15 solid-core cable, but it wasn't... rather it was a MS2.3 stranded conductor cable.
To confirm my doubts, I had actually cut open the two (both the black and olive) cables, and yes, both cables were stranded conductors, no solid-core cable as per Ecosse's cable literature was to be found (according to Ecosse; at least one of the two cables in the Ecosse MS4.7 Bi-Wire Speaker Cable set are supposed to have been a solid core conductor).
So, lets come up with a short Ecosse Cable FAQ checklist now...
-> Ecosse cables designed in the UK? Maybe, but unlikely.
-> Ecosse cables made in the UK? Unlikely.
-> Ecosse cables made as per product literature? Definitely not.
The fact that the black cable (as visible in the second photo above) has "SGSCC-1" written on it (an Everyoung product) and absolutely no Ecosse branding on it simply makes the cable shout out "Made in China"... and this has caused my confidence in Ecosse Cables to crash down to the ocean floor.
Does anyone share the same opinion as my self with regards to what I had uncovered? Feel free to share your opinions, I'd be more than interested to have a look at the point of view of others in this forum.
