SC Digital Cable
Every bit arrives. None are late. The cable is not the bottleneck.
Key Features
Specifications
Digital audio cables transport a binary signal — ones and zeros — but the fidelity of that transport is not binary. The edges of digital pulses have finite rise times, finite fall times, and finite susceptibility to the electrical properties of the medium through which they travel. Resistance attenuates the signal. Impedance discontinuities cause reflections. Magnetic interference couples noise into the signal path. Thermal drift changes the impedance over time. Each of these mechanisms degrades the timing precision of the digital signal, and timing precision is the only thing that matters in digital audio transport. A bit that arrives at the right time is a correct bit. A bit that arrives at the wrong time is jitter.
The SC Digital Cable eliminates every one of these mechanisms simultaneously. The YBCO superconductor has zero resistance, which means zero attenuation and zero resistive jitter. The cryo-locked impedance — 75 ohms for coaxial S/PDIF or 110 ohms for balanced AES/EBU — is determined by the conductor geometry and the dielectric constant of the cryogenic environment, both of which are fixed at 77 kelvin. There is no thermal drift because there is no thermal variation. The operating temperature is maintained by liquid nitrogen, a substance that boils at one temperature and one temperature only. The Meissner effect expels all magnetic flux from the conductor interior, providing not shielding but exclusion — the physical impossibility of magnetic field penetration, enforced by the quantum mechanical properties of the superconducting state.
The practical result is a digital cable that contributes less than 0.01 picoseconds of jitter to the signal chain — a figure that represents the noise floor of the best available measurement instrumentation, not a limitation of the cable. At this level of performance, the SC Digital Cable is transparent to any source format currently in existence: 768kHz PCM, DSD512, DSD1024, and whatever higher-resolution format may emerge. The cable’s bandwidth is not the limiting factor. The cable’s jitter is not the limiting factor. The cable’s magnetic isolation is not the limiting factor. For the first time in the history of digital audio interconnection, the cable is not the limiting factor.