The Chord Company's origin is one of British hi-fi's great kitchen-table stories. In 1985, during a dinner in Salisbury with visiting Naim Audio retailers from the US, the conversation turned to a problem: American retailers needed a good-quality DIN-to-RCA interconnect that didn't yet exist. At the table was Sally Gibb, married to a Naim executive, who made the fateful suggestion that she simply make the cables herself. With Naim's blessing, she built the first prototypes on her own kitchen table, named the cable Chrysalis, and shipped an initial order of 250 to the US.

That first cable set the template for everything that followed: cables developed organically, each building on lessons learned from the last, always fully designed and manufactured in Britain. Success soon outgrew the kitchen table, and by 1994 the Chord Cobra had won What Hi-Fi?'s inaugural Best Cable Award — a breakthrough that established Chord as a serious force in UK hi-fi. The company has been based in a purpose-built facility deep in the Wiltshire countryside, near Stonehenge, since 2004.