In 1982 Sony gave us Perfect sound forever, along with the attitude that,its just digital, so all CD players sound the same. That was disproved andqualitative differences between players became accepted truth. Next cameseparate transport and DAC combos, which brought with it the attitude that allS/PDIF digital audio cables sound the same until that too became disproved.Now the frontier has moved once again. Is digital audio really just ones andzeros? AudioQuest doesn’t believe so, and once youve had a chance to listen toForest USB, you wont think so either
SOLID 0.5% SILVER CONDUCTORS: Solid conductors eliminatestrand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductorsare excellent for very high-frequency applications, like USB audio. Thesesignals, being such a high frequency, travel almost exclusively on the surfaceof the conductor. As the surface is made of high-purity silver, the performanceis very close to that of a solid silver cable, but priced much closer to solidcopper cable. This is an incredibly cost effective way of manufacturing veryhigh-quality USB cables.
FOAMED-POLYETHYLENE INSULATION: Any solid material adjacent to aconductor is actually part of an imperfect circuit. Wire insulation and circuitboard materials all absorb energy (loss). Some of this energy is stored and thenreleased as distortion. Forest USB uses air-filled Foamed-PolyethyleneInsulation because air absorbs next to no energy and Polyethylene is low-lossand has a benign distortion profile. Thanks to all the air in Foamed-PE, itcauses much less of the out-of-focus effect common to other materials.
TERMINATIONS: Precision gold-plated plugs are carefully attached with thevery best solder. Through choice of flux and metallurgy, AQ solder has beenoptimized to make a low-distortion connection. The difference you hear betweensolders is a result of connection quality. AQ solder does not have a high silvercontent because the more silver there is in solder, the more difficult it is tomake a good connection.
UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS DEVICE CLASS DEFINITION FOR AUDIO DEVICES: USB(Universal Serial BUS) was established by a stalwart group of companies such asIntel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft (just to name a few) in order to give thepersonal computing world a truly universal standard and means to connect devicessuch as hard drives, printers, cameras, and, more importantly to us, audiocomponents. Included in the original description are protocols for the pristinetransfer of audio over USB. Great care and sensitivity went into this.Consequently, a computer connected to a USB-enabled digital-to-analog convertercan outperform the best compact disc players available today. AudioQuest iscommitted to contributing products that honor USBs ability to deliverstate-of-the-art performance on this new and wonderful frontier.
