The Wyrewizard Spellbinder is a speaker cable by NORDOST of Massachusetts, USA, which I have been using in my desktop PC audio setup for several years now. Within the NORDOST speaker cable lineup, it belongs to the lowest tier — sold by the metre rather than as a finished, terminated cable, and aimed primarily at home cinema use — but it is, nonetheless, a genuine Made in USA product.
Despite being a budget cable, the thin white outer sheath is generously finished with FEP (Fluorinated Ethylene Propylene). Inside the jacket runs a round 18AWG × 2 configuration of 7N OFC copper — a stiff, wire-like solid core. The one I own is unplated, though at the time a silver-plated version was also available under the same name. The Wyrewizard series has since been discontinued, and the successor model is the flat solid-core Leifstyle 2 Flat Speaker Cable.
The sound of the Wyrewizard Spellbinder is tight and high-speed. It leans towards the leaner side and doesn’t offer an abundance of notes, yet even at this price point it displays that three-dimensional phase accuracy and pinpoint imaging that is characteristic of NORDOST solid-core cables. Even within the miniature-scaled soundstage of a desktop setup, the fine-drawn image outlines and three-dimensional sense of space unfold with a pleasing liveliness. Being an unplated conductor, the tonal character comes through in a straightforward, warm direction — the natural character of the 7N OFC copper showing itself without disguise — and there is none of the abundant reverb or crystalline transparency of the silver-plated Blue Heaven or Red Dawn. Conversely, neither does it exhibit the nervous, edgy high-frequency character that can appear with those models; it is a cable that, despite its speed, has little sense of distortion and is gentle on the ear. That quality is particularly welcome in PC audio, where listener fatigue from distortion-like harshness can easily creep in.
It has a reasonable degree of expressiveness too; while not a particularly deep-sounding cable, it has a good sense of rhythm and a bright, positive, spirited musicality. The unplated conductor means the tonal colour is slightly lacking — straightforward and simple, one might say charitably — but what I personally find most noticeable is that it ends up sounding like a copper-toned monochrome. With the later Wyrewizard Spellbinder silver-plated version, I imagine there would have been more brightness and colour in the upper frequencies, and I do have a small twinge of regret that after getting the unplated type I didn’t go ahead and import the silver-plated one from abroad… (Note: at the time, only the unplated version was available domestically in Japan.)
Among the cables I have on hand, the one with the most similar sonic character is the Tara Labs Space & Time Prism Omni 8N, which bundles several strands of high-purity copper solid-core wire together — though I would say the Wyrewizard Spellbinder has greater transparency and tighter control than the Omni 8N, its warmth is not as extreme, and it has fewer cable-specific colourings and added resonances, giving it a cleaner, more accurate sound overall.
Before adopting the Wyrewizard Spellbinder in my desktop PC audio setup, I had been using the British QED Silver Anniversary XT, and compared with the Wyrewizard Spellbinder, the Silver Anniversary XT tends towards a softer, slightly blurred sonic character. QED’s natural, unbleached tactile quality and the bright, washed-out feel of its silver-coated conductors are appealing in their own way, but even setting aside the fact that both are bulk cables in the same price bracket, the Wyrewizard Spellbinder is clearly superior in both sound quality and rhythmic propulsion. I remember switching between them and thinking — so there was still room for improvement in my PC audio system after all.
In combination with the ELAC CINEMA 2SAT, the tight three-dimensional miniature-like spread of the soundstage and the coherence of tone and time alignment together produce a sound that is more full-range in character (despite the 2-way configuration). The weaknesses are, as one would expect from a lower-tier model, a relative scarcity of notes and a somewhat restrained presentation of string harmonics — though the high-speed snap is certainly there. Precisely because the underlying character is so clean, you find yourself wanting a larger-scaled soundstage and more information retrieval, in the same direction but taken further.
I do intend to step up the speaker cable in my desktop PC audio to something better in due course, and having lived with the Wyrewizard Spellbinder, it has given me enough positive appeal to want to step up within the NORDOST range when that time comes. The logical next step from here would be the Blue Heaven LS, which features a flat-line construction with silver plating — though a single pair of those would cost roughly as much as the entire current desktop PC audio system put together… That said, the retail price here in Japan is, for some reason, actually lower than the US home market price as of this writing (written September 2018) — gulp.
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If I do manage to upgrade to the higher model, it might be rather fun to put the Wyrewizard Spellbinder to work with the FOCAL tweeter in my car audio setup.
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