Kimber Kable Naked Interconnect

Naked answers a question most cable manufacturers work around: the insulation itself degrades the signal. Every polymer dielectric protects the conductor from corrosion and short circuits, and every one of them exacts a cost in fidelity. The best insulator is no insulator at all — air, in lieu of a vacuum. Naked simply removes the polymer.

That creates two practical problems, and the solution to each is the cable. Corrosion is handled at the conductor: uninsulated 24AWG solid core copper is annealed in a hydrogen-rich environment, plated with a thick layer of palladium, then a thick layer of 24-carat gold. The palladium matters more than it sounds — gold plated directly onto copper allows the two metals to diffuse into one another and form alloy regions with poor conductivity, and nickel, the usual barrier, introduces its own distortion through its magnetic properties. Palladium blocks the diffusion without that penalty.

Short circuits are handled geometrically. Six bare conductors per channel — three signal, three return — are braided with strands of un-dyed, unwaxed cotton in Kimber’s open weave, which holds them apart and suspends them in air. The result is as close to an ideal dielectric as is practically buildable.

Naked sits alongside Neo at the top of the Kimber catalogue, but the two cables answer different questions — Neo brings the flagship Select-tier braid architecture to reference systems, Naked strips the dielectric problem out entirely. It is a fragile-looking cable that carries as much engineering as anything twice its weight and wants careful handling during installation. Walk in during business hours or book ahead if the audition needs the actual source and preamp in place — hearing what the absence of a polymer dielectric sounds like is worth doing with the system it will live in rather than a demonstration rig.