AudioQuest Carbon USB

AudioQuest Carbon USB

In 1982 Sony and Philips brought us "Perfect Sound Forever," along with the dogma that "it's all just digital, and therefore all CD players sound the same. That turned out not to be true and qualitative differences between CD players became an accepted fact. Then came the separate transport + DAC combinations that brought with them the dogma that "all digital S/PDIF audio cables sound the same," until that too changed. Now the frontier has shifted once again. Is digital audio really just a matter of zeros and ones? We don't think so, and if you've had a chance to listen to Carbon USB once, you won't believe it either....

SOLID 5% SILVER CONDUCTORS: Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications, like USB audio. These signals, being such a high frequency, travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor. As the surface is made of high-purity silver, the performance is very close to that of a solid silver cable, but priced much closer to solid copper cable. This is an incredibly cost effective way of manufacturing very high-quality USB cables.

SOLID HIGH-DENSITY POLYETHYLENE INSULATION: Any solid material adjacent to a conductor is actually part of an imperfect circuit. Wire insulation and printed circuit board materials absorb energy (loss). Some of this energy is stored and then later released as distortion. Solid High-Density Polyethylene Insulation ensures critical cable geometry while minimizing insulation-induced phase distortion.

CONNECTIONS: The gold plated plugs are carefully assembled with the very best solder. The AQ solder is optimized by making the right choice of flux and metallurgy to make a connection with the least possible distortion. The differences you hear between different types of solder are the result of the quality of the connection made. AQ solder does not have a high silver content because as the silver content in the solder increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a good connection.

UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS DEVICE CLASS DEFINITION FOR AUDIO DEVICES: USB (Universal Serial BUS) was developed by a stalwart group of companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft (to name a few) in order to give the personal computing world a truly universal standard and means to connect devices such as hard drives, printers, cameras, and, more importantly to us, audio components. Included in the original specification are protocols for the pristine transfer of audio over USB. Great care and sensitivity went into this. As a result, a computer connected to a USB-enabled digital-to-analog converter can outperform even the best compact disc players available today. AudioQuest is committed to contributing products that honor USB’s ability to deliver state-of-the-art performance on this new and wonderful frontier.