USB cable for digital audio in copper with 0.5% silver plating
Forest USB adds a thin coat of silver to the copper and, through five terminations, covers nearly every link between a digital source and a converter: from desktop computer to tabletop DAC, from a laptop with nothing but USB-C ports to a pocket-sized device.
Besides digital audio it carries computer data, so it has a place outside the hi-fi system too.
Conductors
Digital signals run at frequencies so high that they move almost entirely along the surface of the wire. That is why the Long-Grain Copper (LGC) receives a 0.5% silver plating: the better metal is put exactly where the signal flows, at a cost far from that of an all-silver conductor. Depending on the termination the conductors are solid or Semi-Solid Concentric; in both cases the aim is to cut the interaction between strands, a cause of distortion and jitter.
Shielding and insulation
Metal-Layer Noise-Dissipation intercepts radio interference: it absorbs and reflects a good part of it ahead of the layer tied to ground, so the reference of the equipment stays clean. Hard-Cell Foam insulation holds nitrogen bubbles, which like air store no energy to hand back to the conductor as distortion; its stiffness keeps signal-pair geometry stable along the whole cable. Every conductor is oriented according to the directionality of radio-frequency noise.
Terminations and lengths
USB-A > USB-B is the typical run from a computer or streamer to a DAC; USB-C > USB-B does the same job starting at a source with a USB-C port. USB-A > USB-C and USB-C > USB-C serve DACs, headphones and devices with a USB-C input, while USB-A > Micro-B 2.0 is for compact units with a Micro-B socket. Each version is offered in 0.75 m, 1.5 m, 3 m and 5 m lengths.
Key features
- Long-Grain Copper (LGC) with 0.5% silver plating
- Metal-Layer Noise-Dissipation against radio interference
- Nitrogen-filled Hard-Cell Foam insulation
- Direction-Controlled conductors
- Terminations: USB-A > USB-B, USB-A > USB-C, USB-A > Micro-B 2.0, USB-C > USB-B, USB-C > USB-C
