AudioQuest Forest USB A>Micro

AudioQuest Forest USB A>Micro

In 1982 Sony and Philips gave us ‘Perfect Sound Forever’, along with the dogma that ‘it’s all just digital, so all CD players sound the same’. That was proven wrong and qualitative differences between CD players became accepted fact. Next came separate transport + DAC combos which brought with it the dogma that ‘all S/PDIF digital audio cables sound the same’, until that too was disproved. Now the frontier has shifted once again. Is digital audio really just ones and zeros? We don’t think so, and once you’ve had a chance to listen to the Forest USB, you won’t believe it either…

SOLID 0.5% SILVER PLATED 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 released as distortion. Solid High Density Polyethylene insulation ensures that critical wire geometry remains intact 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 in flux and metallurgy to make a connection with as little distortion as possible. 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 brave group of companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft (to name a few) in order to give the personal computer world a truly universal standard for connecting peripherals 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 attention was given to this. As a result, a computer connected to a USB-enabled digital-to-analog converter can outperform even the best CD players available today. AudioQuest is committed to delivering products that honor USB's ability to deliver state-of-the-art performance for this new and exciting frontier of music listening.