AudioQuest FIREBIRDHC20A2M 6.6 Feet FireBird High Current AC Power Cable
With the introduction of the Mythical Creatures series of speaker cables, AudioQuest has pushed significantly beyond even its own very high standards.
The same team responsible for the groundbreaking new series of AudioQuest AC power cables—AudioQuest's founder, William Low, and Director of Power Products, Garth Powell—has created what are simply the most transparent, get-out-of-the-way immersive speaker cables ever made. The Mythical Creatures series—ThunderBird, FireBird, and Dragon—are not merely an incremental evolution; their introduction represents a category advance in speaker cable design.
Building on a solid base of familiar AQ technologies, Garth and Bill specifically 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.
All previous attempts to address this issue chose to move the speaker cable’s characteristic impedance to a value closer to the nominal impedance of the speakers. All such attempts failed because a speaker’s impedance changes with frequency, and the amplifier’s output impedance is something else altogether.
By eliminating the Mythical Creatures 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.
These new Mythical Creatures 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. ThunderBird, FireBird, and Dragon BASS cables incorporate our patented common-mode noise-rejection technology, yielding an audibly dramatic additional reason to BiWire when possible.
Whether AudioQuest’s new Mythical Creatures speaker cables are used as Full-Range or BiWire, the beautiful sonic result is the sound of your amplifier doing its job unmolested by either current compression or radio-frequency noise.
Note: Often, the choice between terminating your speaker cables with spade lugs or banana plugs will come down to personal preference. AudioQuest spades and bananas use the same base metal, the same superior plating, and no metal-to-metal junctions, resulting in parts of equal quality. However, the EU-compliant isolated binding posts used on some power amplifiers often makes it difficult if not impossible to tighten spade lugs with high torque or pressure. In these applications, the AudioQuest banana connector is the superior choice, and may be the only choice.
Features
- Solid Perfect-Surface Silver (PSS) & Solid Perfect-Surface Copper+ (PSC+) Conductors
Solid conductors prevent electrical strand-to-strand interaction, major sources 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. The careful choice of the sizes of the PSS and PSC+ conductors ensures that FireBird’s performance is close to using all PSS Silver, but at a much lower cost.
- RF/ND-Tech (Patented Radio-Frequency Ground Noise-Dissipation) Minimizes Circuit Misbehavior By Cancelling Indused RF Noise
AC Ground wires may provide protection from an electrical short circuit, but they also act as an antenna. Thus, they are subject to induced radio-frequency (RF) noise. This RF noise bypasses component power supplies and is typically coupled directly into a system’s most sensitive audio/video circuits. AudioQuest’s RF/ND-Tech greatly reduces this distortion, yielding unprecedented levels of noise dissipation across the widest bandwidth (range) of radio frequencies possible. Our unique circuit topology uses a common-mode phase-cancelling array, in concert with proprietary dielectric materials which provide additional differential linear filtering. US Patent # 8,988,168.
- Uncompressed Current Transfer
While many AC power cables feature low DC resistance in order to accommodate the demand for high current, a cable’s characteristic impedance is also crucial for optimal performance. Unlike most AC cables that constrict or compress an audio-provoked transient, AudioQuest AC cables combine low DC resistance and ZERO (no) characteristic impedance in order to deliver uncompressed high-current transients on demand.
- 72V Dielectric-Bias System (DBS)
Insulation is also a dielectric that can act like a shunt-filter. Biasing minimizes dielectric-noise and linearizes the filter, significantly improving wide-bandwidth dissipation of induced RF noise.
- Directionality
All drawn metal strands or conductors have a non-symmetrical, and therefore directional, grain structure. AudioQuest controls the resulting RF impedance variation so that noise is drained away from where it will cause distortion. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. When applicable, arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality. For most models of AQ cable, the arrows not only indicate the direction that optimizes metal-directionality as part of Noise-Dissipation, but also indicates non-symmetrical attachment of shield and GND in order to optimize full-system performance.
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