About The AudioQuest Pearl USB Type A to Type B Data Cable
The AudioQuest Pearl USB A to USB B Cable is for the budget conscious, but still maintains an incredibly high standard and is not a rebadged no-name product in a fancy box!
You've also come to realise that although in 1982 Sony claimed they gave us "Perfect sound forever," along with the attitude that, "it's just digital, so all CD players sound the same" that this was only advertising hype.
That has been well and truly disproved and qualitative differences between players has become accepted truth. Next came separate transport and DAC combos, which brought with it the attitude that "all S/PDIF digital audio cables sound the same…" That was also disproved. Now the frontier has moved once again. Is digital audio really just ones and zeros? Technically it is, but with many years of listening to products at all prices, we don't believe so.
All AudioQuest cables definitely have a high-quality look and feel and in direct comparison to a free-in-the-box USB cable, you will experience greater bass extension, and the soundstage will be opened up with vocals sounding more natural.
A quality USB cable is a great way to connect your desktop or laptop computer to a half decent audio digital-to-analogue converter. For USB audio, as with all digital audio signals, it's critical to maintain accurate timing. This cable can reduce the timing errors or "jitter" that often makes digital music sound less clear and rich and three-dimensional.
The USB Cable On Budget: AudioQuest Pearl is the USB cable when you something better than no-name stuff but don't want to rob a bank to do so.
Long Grain Copper Conductors: Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion. Pearl's solid Long-Grain Copper allows a smoother and clearer sound than cables using regular OFHC (Oxygen-Free High-Conductivity) copper. OFHC is a general metal industry specification regarding "loss" without any concern for distortion. LGC has fewer oxides within the conducting material, less impurities, less grain boundaries, and definitively better performance.
Foamed-Polyethylene Insulation: Any solid material adjacent to a conductor is actually part of an imperfect circuit. Wire insulation and circuit board materials all absorb energy (loss). Some of this energy is stored and then released as distortion. Forest USB uses air-filled Foamed-Polyethylene Insulation because air absorbs next to no energy and Polyethylene is low-loss and has a benign distortion profile. Thanks to all the air in Foamed-PE, it causes much less of the out-of-focus effect common to other materials.
Terminations: Precision gold-plated plugs are carefully attached with the very best solder. Through choice of flux and metallurgy, AQ solder has been optimised to make a low-distortion connection. The difference you hear between solders is a result of connection quality. AQ solder does not have a high silver content because the more silver there is in solder, the more difficult it is to make a good connection.
About USB
The letters USB stand for Universal Serial BUS and this was established by a stalwart group of companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft (just to name a few) in order to give the personal computing world a truly universal standard and means to connect devices such as hard drives, printers, cameras and more importantly, to us, our audio components. Included in the original description are protocols for the pristine transfer of audio over USB. Great care and sensitivity went into this design. Consequently, a computer connected to a USB-enabled digital-to-analogue converter can outperform the best compact disc players available today. AudioQuest is committed to contributing products that honour USB's ability to deliver state-of-the-art performance on this new and wonderful frontier.
Our Take
AudioQuest Pearl is properly engineered, made with decent materials and is bargain-bin priced. So, if you enjoy listening to digital music files, then you'll be surprised at the difference a quality USB cable can make to your enjoyment.
Main Features & Specifications
- Product Description: AudioQuest Pearl USB 2.0 Type A to USB Type B Data Cable
- Terminations: Gold-plated for maximum signal transfer
- Fitted with a USB type-A connector on one end and a USB type-B connector on the other end
- Conductors: Solid Long Grain Copper
- Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter
- Insulation: The USB cable's solid Polyethylene insulation ensures critical signal-pair geometry
- USB 2.0: This cable exceeds USB 2.0 data rate specifications
- Available Lengths: 750mm; 1.5 Metre; 3 Metre and 5 Metre
- AudioQuest Product Code: AQ-PEARLUSB/0.75
- Manufacturer's Australian Warranty: 5 Years - Does not cover misuse or abuse
Note: Features & Specifications subject To Change Without Notice. E&OE