AudioQuest Pearl USB

AudioQuest Pearl USB

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 LONG-GRAIN COPPER (LGC) CONDUCTORS: Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion. Pearl's solid Long-Grain Copper allows a smoother and clearer sound than cables using regular OFHC (Oxygen-Free High-Conductivity) copper. OFHC is a general metal industry specification regarding "loss" without any concern for distortion. LGC has fewer oxides within the conducting material, less impurities, less grain boundaries, and definitively better performance.

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.