The Best Digital Cable from Analysis Plus
Digital Crystal cable is the best digital cable made by Analysis Plus. It uses Continuous Cast Copper (solo crystal copper) braids with the company's patented Hollow Oval design to bring out the best in your equipment.
Choose single-ended with locking RCA connectors or balanced with Neutrik XLR connectors.
Avoiding Frequency Smear
Digital audio/video signals are often transmitted in serial with some compressed format from the original PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) signals. Since the serial transmission is normally done with a serial cable (a single pair), no clock signal is transmitted directly. Instead, this clock signal is recovered at the DAC from the transmitted PCM signal via PLL (Phase Locked Loop) technique.
A phase shift will occur if the edges are not sharp, the input circuit has different thresholds, and the rising and falling edges are non-symmetrical. This phase shift will directly affect the reconstructed clock frequency. But how severe the phase shift is depends on both the rising and falling edge of the transmitted encoded PCM signal. In other words, the re-constructed audio/video signal will have a frequency smear if the clock signal phase has a variable delay.
Analysis Plus Digital Crystal cable with its hollow oval design has the incredible fast rise time which you need to get the best performance from digital components while avoiding frequency smear.
Revolutionary Hollow Oval Design
Analysis Plus is uniquely qualified as an authority on cable design. The Detroit-based company earned its reputation testing and analyzing cables for leading cable manufacturers whose names you'd recognize in a flash. After examining the best, Analysis Plus decided it could do even better by developing its own proprietary hollow-oval conductor design.
Why the unique conductor geometry? Mark Markel and Qinwei Sun, the chief engineers at Analysis Plus, determined that round cable used in conventional analog cable designs has high levels of current bunching, skin effect phenomenon, and other frequency characteristics that degrade signal quality. Rectangular conductors were a little better, but these suffered high electric field values caused by sharp corners which can also cut into and injure the dielectric when the cable is flexed.
After many computer simulations, Analysis Plus found that a hollow oval cable was the best design due to its minimal change in resistance with frequency, plus other benefits. The company chose a flexible, braided conductor rather than the conventional solid conductor, which is susceptible to kinks and deformations with resulting signal degradation. A unique woven pattern places every wire statistically as close to the return current as every other wire for evenly distributed high-current density and superior sound. | 
