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Key Features
AudioQuest keep everything simple with the Carbon Digital Coaxial cable. A further increase of silver cladding on the conductor over the Cinnamon and Forest ranges just ups the sonic performance a little and the conductor gauge itself is also enlarged from 24 AWG to 21 AWG.
Product Ref: 200869
The Carbon by AudioQuest takes a big step into serious audio quality by turning solid silver plating (featured on the Forest and Cinnamon ranges) into silver cladding with a huge increase in this precious material. The extra silver lavished upon the conductor - also increased in size to 21 AWG - delivers brilliant audio results with digital equipment from high-end CD players and DAC's to top quality soundbars and amplifiers.
AudioQuest keep things simple by getting the basics absolutely right and simply increasing material quality through their many ranges. It's a brilliant eco-system which is hugely successful and gives you great trade-in value if you ever improve your equipment and wish to upgrade your cables in the future.
This excellent cable is finished with 'hanging silver'-plated RCA plug terminations. First, super-pure purple copper plugs are submersed in melted down 100% silver, a superior technique over the mass batch process of electroplating plugs. You'll first notice the gorgeously gleaming plug finish, normally to achieve such a shiny plug you plate a nickel barrier layer underneath silver or gold. A huge added benefit with 'hanging silver' is it being immune to blackening and discolouring unlike gold or nickel. The plug is then 'cold welded' - a technique that avoids solder-type connections which can disrupt a signal's path and introduce a new metal to the equation.
Shielding is also important on digital cables so AQ provide maximum shield coverage with special attention paid to the metal quality to ensure the the conductor is well shielded from interference but also the return path. Carbon features a foil and silver-plated braid for shielding.
Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications, like digital 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 digital audio cables.
Noise, in the form of RF energy, is the mortal enemy of good sound. Our environment is more contaminated with RF than ever before due to the huge proliferation of RF radiating devices like computers and mobile phones. Traditionally, RF energy is routed to ground through the use of a 'shield" consisting of either a braided metal or foil. This 'draining' of RF to ground causes a modulation of the ground plane, which in turn causes a form of signal modulation. 100% shield coverage is easy. Preventing captured RF Interference from modulating the equipment’s ground reference requires AudioQuest's Noise-Dissipation System. Metal and Carbon-Loaded synthetics prevent most RFI from reaching the equipment’s ground plane.
Hard-Cell Foam insulation is used exclusively in most of AudioQuest’s video and digital audio cables. Similar to Foamed-PE, it is nitrogen injected to create air pockets. ‘Hard’ foam is used because the stiffness of the material allows the conductors in the cable to maintain the same relationship with each other along the full length of the cable, thus ensuring that the characteristic impedance of the cable is consistent.
Conductor | Solid 5% Silver Plated |
---|---|
Dielectric | Hard-Cell Foam |
Jacket | Braided |
Plug Type | RCA type plug (x2) |
Shielding | Foil & Silver-plated Braiding |
Type | Digital Coaxial |