When Paul's Reference AudioQuest Dragon ZERO Speaker Cables are not in the financial cards, it's time to step up to the PerfectWave Robin Hood ZEROs from AudioQuest. These bad boys bring music to life as few cables can.

The engineers at AQ set out to solve a fundamental problem in loudspeaker/amplifier interactions, impedance mismatch, said to cause compression and a loss of life in the music. By eliminating the speaker cable’s characteristic impedance, current compression and distortion of the signal (current) transient is significantly reduced. The result is dynamic contrast, transient response, and bass slam that are rendered seemingly without effort.

Design

The same team responsible for the groundbreaking new series of AudioQuest AC power cables—AudioQuest's founder, William Low, and Senior Director of Engineering, Garth Powell—has created what AudioQuest considers one of the finest-sounding speaker cables ever made. Robin Hood ZEROs use the same technology as the top-of-the-line Dragons with fewer conductors. In these groundbreaking cables, the designers focused on addressing one of the most vexing issues plaguing speaker cable design: the mismatch between the amplifier’s source impedance and the speaker’s load impedance. The results need to be heard to be believed. These are one great set of cables for connecting PS amps to your speakers.

Application

The Robin Hood ZERO speaker cables may be used in one of two ways: either as ideal Full-Range cables, or, in combination with a dedicated BASS cable, in a BiWire cable assembly of unparalleled performance. Robin Hood cables incorporate AQ's patented common-mode noise-rejection technology, yielding an audibly dramatic additional reason to BiWire when possible. The openness and dynamic contrast is the sound of your amplifier doing its job unmolested by either current compression or radio-frequency noise.

Technology

Solid conductors prevent electrical strand-to-strand interaction: a major source of distortion. Surface quality is critical because a conductor can be considered as a rail-guide for both the fields within a conductor, and for the magnetic fields that extend outside the conductor. The astonishingly smooth and pure surface of all AudioQuest’s Perfect-Surface metals nearly eliminates harshness and greatly increases clarity compared to lesser materials. Extremely high-purity Perfect-Surface Copper+ further minimizes distortion caused by grain boundaries that exist within any metal conductor.

The integrity of any audio transient (instantaneous peak-to-peak voltage swing and current) delivered from a power amplifier to a loudspeaker has always been compromised. Whether the amplifier is valve or transistor, regardless of class of operation, the amplifier’s source impedance and loudspeaker’s load impedance are never critically matched. The speaker cable’s characteristic impedance is yet another culprit in a highly compromised non-linear electrical circuit. AudioQuest has always stated that all cables cause damage because the output is never as good as the input. However, by eliminating a speaker cable’s characteristic impedance, AQ’s ZERO Technology is an unprecedented step towards reducing that damage. The result is greater dynamic contrast, better audio transient response, and bass slam that are rendered seemingly without effort because the cable is not electrically restricting (strangling) the music.

Features

CONTROLLED FOR LOW-NOISE DIRECTIONALITY

SOLID PERFECT SURFACE COPPER+ CONDUCTORS

ZERO TECH, NO CHARACTERISTIC IMPEDENCE

CARBON BASED LINEARIZED NOISE DISSIPATION (NDS)

72V DIALECTIC BIAS SYSTEM

RADIO FREQUENCY TRAP

COLD WELDED TERMINATIONS