Why Cardas?

Cardas' cable design incorporates patented, Golden Ratio, Constant Q, Cross-Field, pure copper Litz, conductor technology. Why should you use it? What will it do for your 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, hysteresis, high filtering, wavy serial impedance and reflections, electrical resonance, dissipation factors, envelope delay, phase distortion, harmonic distortion, piezoelectric effects, hall effect, field effect, voltage and current tracking, thermoelectric phenomenon effects, structural return loss, skin effect, 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 Stranding to high-end audio, but Golden Ratio, 1.6180339887... : 1 is as old as nature itself. Golden Ratio is the mathematical proportion nature uses to shape leaves and sea shells, insects and people, hurricanes and galaxies, and 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.

Every interconnect, every speaker cable, every chassis and speaker wire has its own resonant signature. The sound or audio signal produced 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.

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. When strands are combined in a conductor they interact with other same sized, near unison, and multiplistic sized strands. This creates beats the same way a cube listening room would, or one with multiplistic dimensions like 8' x 16' x 32'.

The sound produced by any stereo system depends on the purity of the audio signal it produces. When the cable linking all components together imparts its own sound, the audio signal is corrupted. Cardas created a multiple strand conductor, where every individual strand is coupled to another, sharing no common mathematical node or resonant point, which in effect, absorbs or cancels the noise that each strand creates. This is the same reason the standard audio listening room is 10' x 16' x 26' (read: 10.00000' x 16.18033...' x 26.18033...' or Golden Ratio). An infinitely indivisible progression known as the Fibonacci Sequence or Golden Section is the 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 quad-eutectic solders. Copper has proven to be the best conductor for an audio signal, but the purity of the copper is critical to the signal's quality. Cardas uses only diamond dies, in an atmosphere of pure nitrogen, to draw the individual copper strands. This prevents the surface contamination that occurs when standard metal dies are used. As each strand is drawn, while it is still in the nitrogen atmosphere, the critical surface area is immediately given an enamel "Litz" coating for insulation and cable longevity. Ordinary uncoated copper stranding corrodes in a relatively short time. During every step in the manufacturing process Cardas maintains the purity of the copper until it is sealed during termination.

Every detail in Cardas cables is at the leading edge. Pure Teflon(r) 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 an ultra pure, quad-eutectic solder 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 and care in construction that puts Cardas at the heart of the most uniquely musical systems in the world.