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During the mid eighties, there was a shortage of ultra pure, ultra soft copper in the United States and the consistency of costly imported copper was poor, so Cardas Audio began manufacturing its own copper conductors. Other manufacturers, using quality materials and carefully monitoring standard drawing processes, produced a good conductor, but not a great one. Conventional manufacturing starts with pure copper, but during the drawing process, adds impurities, hardens and oxidizes the copper. Cardas developed a method to actually purify and super anneal the conductor during manufacture.
Starting with pure electrolytic bar copper with no recycled content, our proprietary process reduces, refines, draws, polishes and anneals the conductor. Conventional copper is annealed only after the final drawing stage, using a quick, electrical current process called Resistance Annealing. Cardas copper, however, is annealed the time consuming way, in reduction ovens, at every stage of the process for the Ultra grades and every other stage for the Super grades. Cardas does not use standard metal drawing dies. As metal dies wear, they leave impurities in the sonically important surface of the conductor. Cardas uses only custom diamond dies to protect and polish the wire each time it is drawn. Cardas also developed a special coating to protect the copper between drawing stages and after its production. The wire is pulled into an oxygen free atmosphere where it is given a protective coating. This process ultimately eliminates the oxidation and corrosion that destroys other audio cables. At Cardas, we use this urethane enameled conductor for the construction of our cables.
Cardas’ cable design incorporates patented, Golden Ratio, Constant Q, Cross-Field, pure copper Litz, conductor technology. Why should I use it? What will it do for my system?
It is said, wire is just wire. In reality, a high-end audio cable must balance resistance, capacitance, inductance, conductance, velocity of propagation, RF radiation and absorption, mechanical resonance, strand interaction, high filtering, reflections, electrical resonance, dissipation factors, envelope delay, phase distortion, harmonic distortion, , structural return loss, corrosion, cross-talk, bridge-tap and the interaction of these and a hundred other things. As a high-end cable manufacturer, Cardas Audio strives to address every detail of cable and conductor construction, no matter how small.
An elegant solution deals with quality, not quantity. Cable geometry problems are resolved in the cable’s design, not after the fact with filters. George Cardas received U.S. Patent Number 4,628,151 for creating Golden Section Stranding Audio Cable. It is truly unique. George introduced the concept of Golden Section Constant "Q" Stranding to high-end audio, but Golden Ratio, 1.6180339887... : 1 is as old as nature itself. Golden Ratio is the mathematical proportion of life itself, the heart of musical scales and chords. "Discovered" by the Greeks, but used by the Egyptians in the Great Pyramid centuries before, man has employed Golden Ratio to create his most beautiful and naturally pleasing works of art and architecture.
The signal used by your system, be it digital or analog, through tube or solid state, is always alternating current. The cyclic effect of alternating current vibrates the wire in your system like the strumming of a guitar string. The beating of the capacitive, inductive and mechanical elements in audio cable is set in motion by the transient energy of the audio signal, just as the guitar string is set into motion by the strike of a pick. This form of vibration or resonance distorts the audio signal and produces many sound anomalies, from colored bass to glare. Every interconnect, every speaker cable, every chassis and speaker wire has its own resonant signature. Like the mass, tension and hardness of the guitar string, the mass, tension and hardness of the conductor, coupled with its inductance and resistance, and the capacitance of the cable, determine what sound is made. Each strand in a cable has its own note or beat. Conductor strands interact with other same sized, near unison, and multiplistic sized strands creating beats the same way a cube listening room would, or one with multiplistic dimensions like 8’ x 16’ x 32.
Stereo systems depend on the purity of the audio signal. When the cable linking all components together imparts its own sound, the audio signal is corrupted. Cardas created a conductor that absorbs or cancels the noise released by the current fluxuation, by progressively layering strands that share no common resonant multiple. This conductor uses the same mathematical proportioning seen in the worlds greatest concert halls for essentially the same reasons. The infinite indivisibility of the Fibonacci Sequence or Golden Section is a key to controlling resonance. The ratio of ø (Phi), or 1 to 1.6180339887... to (infinity), is the Golden Mean, called Golden Ratio or Golden Proportion. George Cardas holds the patent, U.S. Patent Number 4,628,151, where the ratio of ø is applied to any electrical conductor.
In Golden Section Stranding, individual strands are arranged so each strand is coupled to another, whose note or beat is irrational with its own, thus nulling interstrand resonance. This is the famous "Silent Conductor". It is the silence of Cardas conductors that allows them to be so uniquely musical and pure.
At the heart of cable oscillation is inductively stored energy. This energy results from the lowered internal "Q", or resonant point, of conventional conductors. George Cardas has a second U.S. patent, number 4,980,517, describing a unique stranding method where strands diminish in size towards the interior of the conductor. This design is called Constant Q Stranding and it allows each strand of the cable to share the load equally. It is a very effective method of reducing the internal rise in inductance seen in ordinary conductors, without compromising the symmetry of the conductor or the capacitance of the cable.
Ordinary Cables are di-pole antennas, both radiating and absorbing RFI/EMI, which sustains system resonance. George’s cable design incorporates Crossfield Construction in its manufacture, which reverses every other stranding layer to defuse the di-pole effect.
Cable resonance is further reduced through the use of ultra pure copper, air dielectrics and special ultra pure eutectic solders. Our ultra pure and soft metals have proven to be the best conductors for audio signals. Cardas uses diamond dies exclusively, drawing the strands in a hydrogen reduction atmosphere. This process reduces the amount of impurities and eliminates the surface contamination that occurs when standard metal dies are used. As each strand is drawn, the resultant ultra pure surface is immediately given a urethane enamel "Litz" coating. This is a continuous process that results in a perfectly insulated strand and ultimate longevity of the conductors. Ordinary uncoated copper stranding corrodes in a relatively short time. Cardas meticulously maintains the purity of the conductor strands until they are sealed at termination.
Every detail in Cardas cables is at the leading edge. Pure Teflon® is used as a stabilizing wrap to firmly bind the conductors, while thin wall tubes provide an air dielectric to isolate the conductors from each other. George created ultra pure, eutectic solders for a perfect joining of conductor to connector. All connectors are custom machined with rhodium over silver contact surfaces. Finally, to insure the quality of each cable, they are terminated by hand and individually inspected.It is this meticulous attention to details in design, care and construction that puts Cardas at the heart of the most musical systems in the world.
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