Mavros, the Atlas flagship cable, is different from those we’re used to, both physically and sonically. Mavros is a range, rather than a single product, that embraces speaker cable, single-ended interconnects and a balanced/XLR-based interconnect. All three of which were available for this test, though it’s the single-ended interconnect and a 2 into 4 bi-wire speaker cable that we’re concentrating on here.

This is a simple coaxial cable where the core is 'hot' and the screen carries return current. Nevertheless, it's a relatively bulky cable with a 9mm outer diameter. As a result, it's not amazingly flexible.

Atlas' Hyper 1.5 sits within a larger family of cables, with the 1.5 denoting the cross-sectional area in square millimetres. That's not actually a vast amount of copper by speaker cable standards, but over normal-length runs, resistance doesn't add up to anything too alarming

There are, of course, speaker cables that cost a good deal more than Ascent 2.0, but £460 for a terminated 3m set of speaker wires is definitely not mass-market stuff. In fact, it represents the top of the Atlas range

It's interesting that this £15 per metre speaker cable is more than halfway up the Atlas range and is rated by the company as one of its 'high performance' models. From some cable manufacturers, £15 per metre will hardly get you the time of day

The Atlas Compass is the middle of three digital/video cables and as such is probably the one most likely to appeal as an upgrade to basic CD transport/DAC installations.