---

Voodoo Labs VL Carbon Age Master Speaker Cables by Richard Mak

I don’t like doing cable reviews. In fact, I am not particularly fond of the audio cable industry as a whole, so I turn down nearly all cable review requests. Of all the sectors in high-end audio, this is the one most comfortably populated by voodoo and well-dressed nonsense, and the highest profit margin. Country-of-origin claims are frequently elastic. Many brands proudly declare themselves “made in” wherever their assembly department resides. Yet very few manufacturers make their own conductors. Most manufacturers are in fact just assemblers, buying OEM bulk cables, many from large factories in Taiwan or China and terminating, sleeving, soldering, and repackaging them, then inflating the price by 50-200x.   

The industry is also thick with pseudo-science dressed up as engineering. Too often, more effort goes into marketing prose and lacquered presentation boxes than into serious scientific inquiry. We are fed a steady diet of quantum tunneling, faster electron flow, catastrophic skin effect, time-aligned electrons, cryogenic molecular realignment, directional conductors, dielectric bias systems, nano-particle signal guidance, burn-in at the atomic level, and direction mined flow in copper. The terminologies are impressive, but simply ask the question: how does an audio signal actually get transmitted through an electrical wire? Is it like a stream of water flowing through a pipe, a cascade of electrons rushing down the conductor, or something else entirely? Many cable manufacturers can’t even answer this basic question!

The fact that many still print a directional arrow on the cable jacket tells you they haven’t done their homework. If you want a proper real-physics-based explanation showing that what really carries the signal is the electromagnetic wave around and along the conductor, not a parade of electrons flowing like water in a pipe, read this explanation about how electrical signals propagate in wires: Electromagnetic signal propagation in wires and cables explained or How Electrical Energy Really Flows: A Journey through Poynting’s Vector.  

Nothing mysterious flows inside a conductor. In fact, nothing “flows” at all. Electrons drift very slowly, merely sustaining the electric and magnetic fields, while energy itself travels rapidly through the surrounding electromagnetic field, as described by the Poynting vector. The wire only shapes and guides this flow; it does not carry energy itself. Never in the history of audio has a single electron gone through a cable to accomplish something at the other end. 

Then there is this article: In Blind Test, Audiophiles Unable to Tell Difference Between Sound Signal Run Through an Expensive Cable and a Banana.” Cable reviews carry significant reputational risk to those writing about them, especially expensive ones, that we have somehow sold our soul to the devil promoting five to six figured snake oils. I like to stress that nobody “paid” me to write good things about this Voodoo Labs VL cable, nor was I given any freebies. Anything I write about and eventually choose to own, I pay for them just like anyone else. I earn sufficiently well in my primary profession, outside of the audio industry, that no amount of incentive would be enough to buy my opinion. 

Here Comes the Voodoo

Stripping away the voodoo and mythology, my skepticism toward the cable industry does not mean I cannot hear a difference, at least I belong to the camp who thinks we can hear a difference between a banana vs a cable. In fact, those differences can be striking, which is what the Voodoo Labs Carbon Age Master Speaker Cables did to my system, hence my decision to write about them. These carbon cables are unlike anything I have heard. They just sound very different from conventional metal cables which I am used to. They also depart quite markedly from earlier “carbon” cables I’ve encountered. Previous carbon designs sound soft and smooth, but they lack oomph, weight and physical presence. There is a certain politeness to them, but that’s about it. 

The Voodoo Labs Carbon Age Master Speaker Cable, however, is presented as a hand-built, patented design from Northern Germany, positioned at the middle of their range and produced in very small quantities. Instead of traditional metal conductors like copper or silver, it uses a structure made from carbon nanotubes, not easily repackaged from a Taiwanese OEM Catalogue, or from Neo-Tech. 

Earlier generations of carbon-based conductors relied largely on amorphous or loosely structured carbon, which has significantly lower electrical conductivity than copper. The carbon nanotubes from Voodoo Labs are fundamentally different–they are extremely small cylindrical structures made entirely of carbon atoms. You can think of them as a sheet of graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern, rolled up into a tube. These tubes are only a few nanometers in diameter, which is thousands of times thinner than a human hair, but they can be relatively long compared to their width.

What makes carbon nanotubes interesting is their combination of properties. They are incredibly strong for their size, very lightweight, with conductivity that can approach, or under certain conditions rival metals, while also offering very different electromagnetic behavior. Depending on how the graphene sheet is rolled, they can behave either like a metal or like a semiconductor. Because of this, they are studied for use in electronics, materials science, and advanced engineering applications.

Understanding the Science Behind Voodoo Labs

Each Voodoo Labs Carbon Age cable contains a very large number of these microscopic tubes, which are individually conductive and separated by air or insulating space. Because of this geometry, the cable is described as supporting the propagation of the electromagnetic field within a distributed structure. Only the terminations use metal, and the connections are made using a proprietary method since carbon cannot be soldered in the conventional way.

From a physics perspective, electrical signals in cables are transmitted by electromagnetic fields that travel along and around the conductors, rather than by the electrons themselves moving significantly. The design of these patented Voodoo Labs cables shapes how the fields propagate, using over a million tiny conductive paths per cable and minimizing interaction with insulating materials (dielectrics). Reducing dielectric interaction limits energy storage effects caused by capacitance and inductance, allowing the signal to move with minimal distortion or delay.

These Voodoo Labs cables contain countless microscopic tubes enable the musical signal to spread evenly throughout the conductor, very unlike conventional metal cables. The so-called skin effect, the depth to which different frequencies can couple to a conductor’s electrons, is negligible here. Another important factor is that carbon atoms have four valence electrons, compared with only one in copper or silver. These electrons form what physicists call a Fermi sea: a dense, collective “pool” of mobile electrons that acts as a conductive medium for the electromagnetic field, much like a well-paved highway allowing traffic to flow efficiently. In this context, the analogy of a four-lane freeway (the carbon nanotube network) versus a one-lane dirt road (typical copper wiring) helps visualize how signal flow may be more efficient and uniform.

How much of this is voodoo? I am not an engineer nor scientist so I am unqualified to evaluate the underlying claims, and I suspect very few in this hobby truly are. From what wikipedia and AI tells me, their claims check out.

And Now, the Banana:

Silky, smooth, with a gentle sheen and glow, elegant and composed. There is a sense of liquidity, a graceful flow from one phrase to the next, with no hint of grain or tension. There, that essentially sums Voodoo Labs up.  May be they’ll quote that on a brochure. But of course, two sentences are hardly going to satisfy the curious, so let me indulge in a bit more detail. I will break it down into four areas where this cable makes its presence most clearly felt: human voices, texture, bass dynamics, and contrast.

On vocals, the silkiness quality is beautifully demonstrated in “Om du bare ønsker det” from the album Jul På Orkesterplass (KKV FXCD418). The opening passages carry a quiet refinement, where the orchestral textures unfold with a soft luminosity with no edge or glare. Strings have a polished, almost satin-like finish, their tone flowing seamlessly without grain or sibilance. Anita Skorgan has the voice of an angel. There is an almost ethereal purity to her tone, a fragile sweetness that can move you to tears. With this Voodoo Labs cable, those qualities feel almost magnified.  

Is this smooth sweetness a coloration, an artificial rounding of edges, like gently smudging the fine lines of a pencil drawing, one might ask? If it were, it would almost certainly come at the expense of detail and ambient information, resulting in a softer, less defined picture. Yet the opposite is what I am hearing. There is greater extension, more low-level detail, more ambient cues and air, and a heightened sense of contrast, akin to bringing an image into sharper focus. What makes this particularly striking is that this added clarity arrives without any trace of grain or hardness, instead there is a liquid-like voluptuous flow. That rare balance between refinement and resolution is precisely what makes this Voodoo Labs cable so compelling. 

The haunting spectre of Maurice Gendron’s performance on his The Early Years, playing Faure’s Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano in G Minor (Philips 438960-2), finally made me realize why anyone would pay over $100 for this old CD. On the backdrop of the piano, Gendron’s playing is direct and expressive, with a natural sense of control. His tone has weight and body, yet remains fluid, and each bow stroke reveals texture, the fine grain of the string and the slight resistance of the bow, presented in a way that feels real and unforced. Set against a very dark background, the image takes on a striking presence, the piano and cello emerging in high contrast as if a spotlight is cast upon him in an otherwise dark room. The cello stands in sharp relief, dimensional and solid, while the piano anchors the space behind it. There is a high contrast realism to the bow as it moves across the strings that allows you to feel the friction and the texture, not just hear it, as though vibrations are transmitted through the air and you can feel it on your chest.

If you do not already own a copy of Ritual Obsessions, do yourself a favour and seek it out. It is not an easy disc to come by, but it rewards the effort. Featuring Duo d’Accord and the eardrum percussion duo, this recording of two pianos and percussion is captured with a strikingly direct, unembellished approach that places the emphasis squarely on transient attack, dynamic contrast, and control. 

Its value as a reference becomes immediately apparent on the second track, “The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls” from Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. Here is where the main difference between these Voodoo Labs carbon nano tube cables differs from previous carbon cables which I have heard. The percussion erupts from silence with startling immediacy, each strike delivered with speed and authority, free from any softening or rounding of impact. Just as critical is the way each note stops, cleanly and decisively, without overhang. The bass dynamics are solid, but never forceful. It hits with authority, yet never bites. There is a clear sense of attack, but it never turns ferocious or pushes the instruments into hardness. The system is pushed to track rapid swings in energy, from near silence to explosive force, and it quickly reveals whether it has the composure to maintain control. The biggest surprise is that all of this was demonstrated not on my Peak Consult Dragon Legends, but on a pair of Falcon Maida Vale LS3/5a. This is not about warmth or weight, but about precision, contrast, and the ability to handle dynamic extremes without strain – on a tiny bookshelf speaker! Plenty of snappiness and tight bass coming out of this 4.5” driver.

The fourth area where this Voodoo Labs cable truly distinguishes itself is dynamic contrast, well demonstrated in Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa performed by the Tapiola Sinfonietta under Jean Jacques Kantorow on BIS CD 834. The piece begins with faint, almost fragile violin lines set against a dark, empty backdrop, barely there, yet clearly defined. From this stillness, the music slowly gathers intensity, layer by layer, the lines becoming more insistent without ever losing their composure. What makes this so compelling is not just the shift from soft to loud, but the way the system preserves the space in between. The background remains black, the images stable, even as the energy builds. When the music finally resolves into those deep, thunderous impacts from the prepared piano, the effect is startling yet controlled, weighty but never bloated, forceful yet never hard. It is this ability to move from near silence to full force, while maintaining clarity, separation, and structure, that reveals the cable’s strength in dynamic contrast. 

Final Words

Here is the part I struggle with. The price. At €11,600 for a 2m pair, it is by any reasonable standard, obscenely expensive. But this article was never meant to be about value for money. That is an equation each reader will have to resolve on their own terms, within their own system, and within their own priorities. What I can say is this. In a category I approach with deep skepticism, Voodoo Cables is one of the very few products that have managed to challenge my assumptions and leave a lasting impression. Whether that justifies the asking price is a question I will leave open. What is not in question is what I heard.  

So at the end, I purchased my Voodoo Labs review sample, but I can only use this for my small bookshelf rig.  The main system requires the use of 3 pairs of 5m length cables, and the price for this quantity will be prohibitive for us mere mortals. Also they cannot build it, since their roping machine, handbuilt after a 19th century large-ship sailmaker’s one, would need a Reeperbahn of 15 meters length for that, and they have only 9, setting a limit of 3m currently.

In a world ravaged by conflicts, wars, and dying children, the exercise in writing this review is an escape from reality. Unfortunately, all of us have to return to face it, let’s just pray and hope it will be a more peaceful one.

Associated Equipment:

Source:  EMM Labs CDSA-SE, Holo Red Streamer, Aries Cerat Kassandra II DAC 

Preamp:  McIntosh C1000 Tube

Power:  McIntosh MC225 x 2

Speaker:  Falcon Maida Vale Edition, LS35a

Interconnects:   Purist Audio Design Aqueous Aureus

Speaker Cable:  Voodoo Labs VL Carbon Age Master Speaker Cable 2m