The AudioQuest Carbon 48 HDMI cable is an excellent, curated match for PS Audio Stellar products, offering a high speed, effortless, sonic experience when connecting I2S digital audio through our HDMI style connectors.

PS Audio's I2S digital audio interface is a critical link between source and DAC. The better the HDMI cable, the better the sound coming out of your loudspeakers. Carbon 48 HDMI adds 5% silver-plating to its solid-core conductors for high-speed data transfer. Like all AudioQuest HDMI cables, Carbon 48 uses Solid High-Density Polyethylene Insulation, and precise geometry. Specific attention has been paid to maximizing the performance of HDMI, and these HDMI cables push sonic performance to new levels at this price point.

Design

Carbon 48 HDMI cables uses 5% silver-plated solid core conductors, but also introduces AudioQuest's carbon based 3-layer noise dissipation system (NDS). NDS's alternating layers of metal and carbon-loaded synthetics "shield the shield," absorbing and reflecting most of this noise/RF energy before it reaches the layer attached to ground. This results in a significant drop in the perceived noise floor and an increase in dynamic contrast, preserving all the subtle nuances and textures of the audio signal.

Application

Not all HDMI cables can transmit the full 18Gbps of data required to optimize today’s HDMI 2.0 equipment, but AudioQuest Carbon 48 HDMI cables exceed 18 Gbps and are guaranteed to exceed the requirements for all possible HDMI data streams, including I2S high-definition audio through PS Audio's interface.

Technology

Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications, like HDMI 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 HDMI cables.

While it's easy to accomplish 100% shield coverage, it's far more difficult to prevent captured Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from modulating the equipment's ground reference. That requires AQ's Noise-Dissipation System (NDS). Traditional shield systems typically absorb and then drain noise/RF energy to component ground, modulating and distorting the critical "reference" ground plane, which in turn causes a distortion of the signal. NDS's alternating layers of metal and carbon-loaded synthetics "shield the shield," absorbing and reflecting most of this noise/RF energy before it reaches the layer attached to ground.

Features

HARD CELL FOAM INSULATION

3-LAYER NOISE DISSIPATION SYSTEM

SOLID 5% SILVER-PLATED CONDUCTORS

DIRECTIONALLY CONTROLLED CONDUCTORS