WSS Platin Line LS4

The WSS-Kabelmanufaktur GmbH & Co. KG run by Jochen Bareiß has been quietly manufacturing affordable High End loudspeaker cables from its home base in Nürtingen since 2002. Each cable is built to WSS specifications and combines highest-quality materials with patented made-for-audio designs. Since its very beginnings, the company has maintained an excellent reputation among audiophiles for its expertise in cable design and down-to-earth product pricing.

A Trusted Standard.

When Daniela Manger entrusted me with a pair of P2 loudspeakers at the Norddeutsche HiFi-Tage trade fair in early February 2025, she mentioned that her speakers performed best when set up in combination with WSS speaker cables. As I still held the company name in good esteem from listening sessions with my former HiFi mentor Luigi di Adamo, I was not surprised by her suggestion and agreed to take this into consideration for my review. The circumstances at the fair, however, prevented me from taking the WSS cables home with me that day. Instead, Daniela asked Jochen Bareiß to send me a pair of his Platin Line LS4 speaker cables by mail.

As, upon my return to our studio in Marne, the WSS cables had not yet arrived, I first set up the Manger P2 using my standard Belden 9497 speaker cables. The amplifier was a Symphonic Line RG10 MK4 Reference in combination with Rolf Gemein’s newly designed Music Cable power cord. My music sources were one trusty Thorens TD320 turntable, featuring an Audiophonics linear power supply and Audio Technica VM95 ML cartridge, as well as a Marantz CD-17 “Ken Ishiwata Signature” CD player wired with Symphonic Line Harmonie HD interconnects. To unleash its audiophile potential, our Thorens was placed on a vibration-cancelling base that was built by Klaus Finnern of Nordic Wood Art for me. Some degree of resonance treatment had also been applied on the Marantz player for a similarly positive effect.

The first listening sessions already revealed a level of sophistication that was highly convincing, with the Manger P2 speakers boasting musical detail and transients that I would rather have expected from our electrostatic Martin Logan SL3 speakers. As I had never heard the Manger P2 perform even remotely at this level while visiting any of the audio shows, I was relieved to see that my review would be a positive one after all. And although Manger’s bending wave driver concept made perfect sense from an acoustic perspective, the fabled transducer did prove to be demanding in terms of front-end integrity and room placement, if it was to show its full potential. In sum, I felt deeply satisfied with the P2’s performance and started to have my doubts whether the WSS cables would have anything more to contribute to this.

First Impressions.

The set of Platin Line LS4 speaker cables came in two simple yet sophisticated suitcase boxes with inner foam lining. One box held the pair of single-wiring speaker cables and the other contained the four cable jumpers for the bi-wiring terminals. All cable ends were terminated with hollow bananas featuring a beryllium/copper base and rhodium-plated surface. The exception was of one of the jumper ends, which featured a spade in order not to get in the way of the speaker cable’s hollow banana plugs. Similar to the Symphonic Line Harmonie HD speaker cables, the WSS Platin Line LS4 use one separate wire strand for the positive and one for the negative connector. On the WSS cables, however, these stands are then joined via shrink tube sleeves at both ends and loosely twisted together for additional shielding effect. The cables look unobtrusive, feel solidly robust, and are well manufactured.

Having connected the LS4 and returned to my listening chair, it did not take me more than five seconds to realise that these speaker cables were indeed special. They had the ability to acoustically step aside and let the music play. The amount of dynamic freedom was more pronounced than on any of the setups I had heard before. While the Belden were superb sounding cables that offered a sense of harmony commonly associated with solid-core designs, speed and agility similar to silver wires, and the musical insights of a low inductance cable, the LS4 did all of this and elevated the experience to a whole new level. For the first time in my audiophile listening explorations, the characteristics of the HiFi system acoustically separated themselves from the recording to set the music free.

I could understand Luigi di Adamo’s long-time fixation with WSS cables and also see why Daniela Manger had nudged me to review her speakers with the LS4 cables. In the end, it was not just one characteristic alone, but a combination of many that made the Platin Line LS4 so potent. Agility and rhythm, tonality and timbre, transients and decay, bass and treble extension: neither of the acoustic properties can fully describe the transformation that happens when the degrading effects of a cable disappear to make its properties invisible to the ear. It was at that moment that I decided to give Jochen Bareiß a call to learn more about the company history and the philosophy behind the LS4 cables. However, as Jochen is quite busy running the WSS Kabelshop, his Hoerenswert-HiFi studio, and visiting trade fairs, I did have to make a few unsuccessful calls, before he eventually called me back and we could have our long talk.

What and Who is WSS?

In this talk, Jochen explained that WSS (the acronym for wire@sound systems) was originally founded by Konrad Wächter in 2002. Wächter was a genuine cable expert who had migrated from the former East Germany to the West in search of better opportunities for his exceptional skills. He was soon hired to run the engineering department for Specialised Cable Applications of a Stuttgart cable works. Wächter later left the company to found his own Kabel Wächter GmbH, a company soon to be known for its innovations in cable designs. When he finally sold the company in 1995, he had many patents to his name and the financial freedom to do what he enjoyed.

As Wächter was not only a cable expert but also an active musician who had studied the bassoon, the idea of manufacturing cables for music applications presented a great opportunity for him to combine his passions in a single project. The Platin Line LS4 is a testament to Wächter’s dedication to music, in that it allows the original signal to reach the loudspeakers without the loss of detail and dynamics associated with broad frequency cable connections. At this time, Jochen Bareiß was running a HiFi studio not too far from Wächter’s new cable company and started to sell them in his shop. He became a regular customer, so that a friendship formed between the two men.

In 2019, Jochen joined WSS to handle the administration of the business, and preparations were made for Konrad Wächter to retire. Jochen Bareiß renamed the company into WSS-Kabelmanufaktur and has been successfully running the shop on his own since 2022. The WSS focus remains on high quality products at affordable prices. The Platin Line constitutes the company’s mid-priced speaker cable segment of which the LS4 is the highest contender. It is made up of seven strands of OFH copper varying in thickness and seven stands of silver-coated copper. As no primer is used in the coating, the silver layer is uncommonly thick and does not bear the risk of acoustic harshness. The wires are stranded in a patented ZS design to reduce cable inductance. The conductor diameter is 2x 4.8 mm² per channel. Teflon is used as dielectric, and a combination of thermoplastic and textile sleeve complete the cable on the outside.

A Real-World Test.

When the P2 speakers were returned to Daniela Manger, I connected my Martin Logan SL3 electrostats to the WSS and was intrigued by the consistency of sound. I completed my article on the Symphonic Line RG10 Reference, and the LS4 played an important role in my assessment to this amplifier. They also led me to reassess the considerable merits of the Martin Logan speakers that had the ability to grow with each improvement. To achieve maximum homogeneity, I had to connect the speaker cables to the bass driver of the Martin Logans and to connect the panels via the jumpers. When connected the wrong way around, the panels acoustically outpaced the dynamic bass driver, causing a slurred impression.

While there are lots of grand theories about speaker and cable design, what ultimately counts is how they appeal to the human ear. In this case we had a friend visit us from Thuringia. Although Katrin is not an audiophile listener by definition, she does enjoy music and is a keen theatre goer. She loves musicals and asked me if she could listen to the Phantom of the Opera on our system. Katrin had seen this musical live in Hamburg and had a CD with some of the songs of it at home. I checked our CD library and found a copy of the full musical. As a kid I had been to the Broadway show and remembered one or two songs that I liked. I remembered the rest of the CD as being rather mediocre and handed Katrin the remote control of the CD player so that she could jump to the track as she liked.

The musical starts with a prelude of almost three minutes, followed by the overture of two minutes, and the first scene of again three minutes. I was sitting on a chair behind Katrin, half expecting her to skip to the next tile and half hoping she would not, because I had never heard the musical in this intensity before. Katrin did not press a button on the remote, until the first CD ended after 19 songs and 60 minutes. She then turned around and looked at me. “So, what do you think?” I asked. “Are you kidding me?” she responded. “This mind-blowingly good and even better than I remember it from the event itself. I could understand every single word, no matter how many people were singing and how many instruments were playing.”

And I knew exactly what she meant, because, until this day, I had not been able to sit through more than three songs of the album. On this system, however, we were both sitting glued to our seats listening for each nuance and following each musical turn the performance took. Music can do that for us, and the WSS Platin Line LS4 are one part of the puzzle.

Specifications

• Type: 2x single-stranded loudspeaker cable
• Application: Single-wiring (with WSS jumpers)
• Termination: beryllium/copper hollow bananas with rhodium-plating
• Design: seven pairs of ZS-stranded wires
• Wire materials: OFH Copper & silver-clad OFH copper
• Manufacturing: silver-coating without primer
• Dielectric: Teflon FEP
• Inner liner: highly flexible thermoplastic
• Outer sleeve: Black textile with thin blue line
• Stranded cross-section: 4.8 mm²
• Cable diameter: 7.8 mm²
• Manufactured in Germany
• Year(s): 2008 -

View full-size image

View full-size image

View full-size image

View full-size image