HMS Gran Finale

HMS are the name initials of one of the pioneers in audiophile music reproduction. Hans Martin Strassner’s interconnects, power cables, and speaker cable designs, are often the culmination of a long journey in Hi-Fi. The Hans M. Strassner GmbH is based in Leverkusen, Germany, and began as a specialised electronics laboratory that developed testing equipment for German industry, before it produced its own set of audio cables in 1993. HMS showed its heritage in research and development in their corporate claim “Messtechnik für Forschung und Industrie”, before this was changed to the more internationally comprehensible “Kompetenz in Kabeln”.

Strassner believed in the importance of perfectly matching the characteristics of amplifiers with the attached loudspeakers to achieve the best quality in sound. And since the speaker cables formed one electrical unit with the loudspeaker’s internal wiring and crossover, the electronics for matching could most easily be positioned there. Hence, from the company’s very beginning in 1993, the HMS line of speaker cables included a box with electronics to be used for amp-to-speaker matching. Strassner never made a secret of the components used in his designs and invited the press to have a look inside. And yet, his designs remain unmatched to this day and have resulted in a number of acclaimed successors in each HMS product line.

The HMS Gran Finale was launched during the mid-1990s and featured Strassner’s signature ‘TOP-Match’ technology. The cable presented here was among the first Gran Finales ever produced and was later succeeded by the 'MKII' and 'Jubilee' (2010) versions in which the materials and components used were further developed and optimised in both single and bi-wiring versions. Recently, the Gran Finale's prime status was diminished by the release of the "HMS Suprema LS". However, this is not to suggest that the original Gran Finale version was lacking in quality or performance. At the time of its release, the cable was the company’s top-of-the-line product and featured everything that HMS understood about loudspeaker cable design.

Its most obvious features included two network boxes with lacquered cherrywood cheeks, high-quality WBT spades and banana terminations and tight-fitting, black-lacquered ferrite beads that were perfectly spaced out along the cables. While the spades were to be clamped down by the amplifier’s terminal screws, the bananas were of split design and could be fixed in position by means of a centre screw. The result was a permanently tight-fitting connection that would stand the occasional accidental tugging. Each cable came in its own foamed suitcase for storing, which contributed to the high-quality touch-and-feel of the HMS Gran Finale.

I installed the HMS cables on our main system featuring our Restek V1 preamplifier with an H&S Exceptional amplifier on Martin Logan SL3 electrostatic loudspeakers. A Sansui SR-525 turntable (with AT-VM95 ML cartridge) and Rega Planet 2000 CD player served as music sources. All units were interconnected using our standard solid-core silver cables with copper-mesh shielding and silver terminations. On the HMS Gran Finale, the switchable TOP-Match box was positioned on the side of the speakers and the bananas screwed in position. Since the component matching was done via two switches in the TOP-Match box, of which each had three positions allowing for 9 setting combinations, I began my listening in the recommended start position with both switches flipped inward into position 1.

The Gran Finale’s ferrite bead design was a testament to Strassner’s belief that all cables, regardless of lengths, acted as antennas and would carry external noise interference in addition to the desired music signals. This observation is particularly significant for our time in which local Wi-Fi networks overlap with all kinds of digital and cellular communication, to create an increasingly complex mesh of interference on many levels and at all times. Strassner explained that the faster the noise signal was, the more likely it would exceed an amplifier’s slew-rate and result in an audible augmentation of the music signal. In addition to preventing external high-frequency interference, the ferrite beads also protected from local EMF that could be caused by cables crossing or running in parallel to each other and also reduced the amount of stray current from the speaker cables themselves in order to minimise signal loss. For improved signal flow inside each cable, Strassner made use of Teflon beads that served to create air pockets around the central conductor while adding structural stability and damping.

With both switches set to 'position 1' in the manual, my first impression was generally positive but not yet ideal. From the very beginning, the sound was smooth and not at all edgy or unaccomplished. The tonal balance shifted towards dark with a slight sense of the bass frequencies being bloated. During faster passages, e.g. in Tony Bennett and Diana Krall’s album “Love is Here to Stay”, the bass lines alternated between bloated and wooden with some lack of control. Voices, too, were on the heavy side, as if the singers had spent a lifetime filled with heavy vaping. Tonal colours appeared overly dense. At the same time, there was a sense of transients being unnecessarily cut short. In this first setting, I felt a constant urge to turn up the volume in order to hear more nuance. I checked the cable's operating manual and found that 'position 1' had been designed for easy to drive 2-way speakers with a flat impedance curve and amplifiers of a damping factor of around 30:1 to 100:1.

Our system was none of the above. The electrostatic drivers instead acted much like capacitors and created high-frequency impedance of sub 2 Ohms. In addition to this, the H&S Exceptional amplifier had a damping factor rated at a formidable 800:1. I started exploring the settings of the TOP-Match box by shifting lever A into middle position (position 3 in the manual) and sat down to listen. I could sense a slight decrease in bass-bloating. Voices, however, were still not as believable as I was used to. After testing all possible combinations by exclusively focusing on Tony Bennett and Diana Krall’s voices, I ended up with both switches leaning outward (position 2 in the manual). I then sat back and listened to the result.

The HMS Gran Finale had lost some of the (at first) impressive lower bass, but now it played a beautiful and highly accurate midrange. Bass, too, now seemed far less accentuated than elegant. Transients were natural with lots of clean spaces between the instruments. The music painted natural colours, and I no longer felt the need to play loud. The longer I listened, the more I noticed how musical these cables had become, increasingly stepping out of the way of the original music event. The stage showed excellent left-to-right panning with a focused, yet wide centre image. While the stage had been lacking depth at first, there now was a pleasant interaction with the listening room that made Tony Bennett and Diana Krall’s Jazz performance really feel alive. I enjoyed listening these cables very much and began dreading the day that I would have to give them back.

The last time I had felt like this was during my test of the Madrigal (Mark Levinson) flat-cables that had reached a similar result by walking a completely different path. The Madrigal had followed the concept of integrating the loudspeakers on the amplifier’s circuit board by rolling out a 50mm wide and flat solid-copper sheet. The HMS Gran Finale, instead, followed the path of shielding their cables as if they were enclosed in the amplifier’s own metal cabinet. And although I am a normally great fan of solid-core cable designs, the Gran Finale’s 1,000+ stranded and braided design lead to a very similar result. While both cables were among the best of their kind, I would probably prefer to own the HMS gran Finale for its TOP-Match cable-to-amplifier accommodation versatility, the unobtrusive look, and the relative ease of installation.

Specifications

• Resistance (R): 10.4 mOhms per meter
• Capacitance (C): 2 nF per meter
• Inductivity (L): 84.6 nHenry per meter
• Conductor material: oxygen free copper (OFC)
• Conductor layout: 1,000+ stands per wire
• Wire diameter: 4.14 sqmm
• Termination: WBT banana plugs and spades
• Length: 2.50 m
• Weight: 850 gr per cable
• Year: 1995 (approx.)
• PDF: Operating Manual (original version)

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