Wide-bandwidth, low-distortion design for focused sound

AudioQuest's Carbon digital coaxial cable is a very smart way to connect your high-performance digital gear. A good application is hooking up a CD player to a digital-to-analog converter or signal processor. AQ's digital coax cables employ materials and construction techniques that minimize distortion across an extremely wide bandwidth.

When it comes to digital audio, lots of people think that cables can't make a difference because "bits are bits." But the time relationships within a digital data stream are critical to reconstructing the analog waveform, that is, the music that reaches our ears. Time-based damage to this information — known as jitter — can make the sound flat and harsh instead of smooth and clear.

Silver-plated solid copper conductor

AQ Carbon relies on a solid conductor to eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Silver-plated solid conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications. Digital audio signals fall into this high frequency range, and they travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor. Since the surface is made of high-purity silver, Carbon's performance is very close to that of a solid silver cable, but priced much closer to a solid copper cable.

Multi-layer RFI and EMI shielding

Cables are a common path for unwanted noise to enter your system, but AudioQuest's multi-layer Noise Dissipation System (NDS) sets up a strong defense. Typical cable shield systems absorb and then drain noise and RF energy to component ground, which modulates and distorts the critical "reference" ground plane. NDS's application of metal- and carbon-loaded synthetics "shields the shield," absorbing and reflecting most of this energy before it reaches the layer attached to component ground. A silver-plated braid shield and an additional layer of copper foil effectively block detail-robbing electro-magnetic interference (EMI).

High-quality connectors eliminate the weakest link

Carbon's RCA connectors are plated with Hanging-Silver, a very thick and unusually pure direct-plating made possible by submerging individual plugs in pure silver, which is a superior approach to the typical process of electroplating batches of plugs by rolling them together in a drum.

AudioQuest uses extremely pure Purple Copper for the base plugs, which are fastened by cold welding — a solder-less process that uses high pressure and silver paste to minimize signal loss. By contrast, solder tends to impede the signal, and heating the silver can negatively affect its conductivity.