AudioQuest Carbon AES/EBU

AES/EBU, developed jointly by the Audio Engineering Society and the European Broadcast Union, established a two-channel digital standard for interconnecting digital devices in the professional world. But, AES/EBU also has its application in the domestic environment as well. While AES/EBU can be single-ended, balanced, or optical, here we refer to the balanced-digital interconnect.

SOLID 5% SILVER CONDUCTORS: Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications. 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.

HARD-CELL FOAM INSULATION: 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.

100% SHIELD COVERAGE (FOIL + TINNED BRAID): Shielding always plays an important role in any cable design, but the shield on coax interconnect plays an especially important role because it functions not only as a shield but a return path as well. Because of this, AudioQuest pays special attention to the shield’s metal quality and the fabrication techniques as both will affect the sound and the picture.

CARBON-BASED 5-LAYER NOISE-DISSIPATION SYSTEM (NDS): 100% shield coverage is easy. Preventing captured RF Interference from modulating the equipment’s ground reference requires AQ’s Noise-Dissipation System. Metal and Carbon-Loaded synthetics prevent most RFI from reaching the equipment’s ground plane.

TERMINATIONS: Cold-Welded, Hanging-Silver directly over pure Purple Copper.