With the introduction of the Mythical Creatures series of speaker cables, AudioQuest has pushed significantly beyond even its own very high standards. William Low, working alongside Garth Powell (the same team who birthed last year’s groundbreaking new series of AudioQuest AC power cables), have created what are simply the most transparent, get-out-of-the-way immersive speaker cables ever made.
The Mythical Creatures series—ThunderBird, FireBird, and Dragon—are not merely an incremental evolution; their introduction represents a category advance in speaker cable design. Building on a solid base of familiar AQ technologies, Garth and Bill specifically focused on addressing one of the most vexing issues plaguing speaker cable design: the mismatch between the amplifier’s source impedance and the speaker’s load impedance.
All previous attempts to address this issue chose to move the speaker cable’s characteristic impedance to a value closer to the nominal impedance of the speakers. All such attempts failed because a speaker’s impedance changes with frequency, and the amplifier’s output impedance is something else altogether. By eliminating the Mythical Creatures speaker cable’s characteristic impedance, current compression and distortion of the signal (current) transient is significantly reduced. The result is dynamic contrast, transient response, and bass slam that are rendered seemingly without effort.
Solid Perfect-Surface-Silver (PSS) Conductors
Perfect-Surface Technology applied to extreme-purity silver provides unprecedented clarity and dynamic contrast. Perfect-Surface Silver (PSS) is AudioQuest’s highest-quality metal. Solid conductors prevent strand interaction, a major source of cable distortion. Extremely high-purity PSS minimizes distortion caused by the grain boundaries that exist within any metal conductor, nearly eliminating harshness and greatly increasing clarity compared to OFHC, OCC, 8N and other coppers.
ZERO-Tech (No Defined Characteristic-Impedance)
Carbon & PSS Silver Based Linear Noise-Dissipation
The world is permeated with RF Noise from satellites, cellular towers, Bluetooth, etc. AQ’s comprehensive Linear Noise-Dissipation employs multiple shields, absorptive carbon, direction-controlled metal, and Perfect-Surface Silver (the best possible RF conducting shield-drain) in order to prevent RF Noise from compromising amplifier performance.
ZERO-Tech
The only complete way to eliminate characteristic-impedance mismatches between a cable and the attached source and load is for the cable not to have any fixed characteristic-impedance value. ZERO-Tech accomplishes this by eliminating interaction between the insulation (dielectric) and the cable’s conductors—enabling uncompressed current transfer. All-important transient current is unrestricted, and RF Noise-Dissipation is linearized (consistent octave to octave).
72v Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) with Level-X RF Noise-Trap
Insulation is also a dielectric that acts like a shunt-filter. Properly biasing the dielectric linearizes the filter, significantly improving the cable’s wide-bandwidth ability to dissipate induced noise. The DBS pack’s Level-X Noise-Trap “pulls” RF Noise out of the cable, further reducing attached audio circuit misbehavior.
Terminations
Dragon cables are Cold-Welded to AudioQuest’s extremely pure Red Copper Spades or Bananas. The bare copper is submerged (hung) in a vat of pure silver instead of being tumbled in a lower-grade solution. AudioQuest speaker breakouts and plug casings are not metal in order not to induce RF Noise into the conductors.
Bi-Wiring
When possible, running separate cables to the treble and bass “halves” of a speaker considerably reduces distortion. Bi-Wiring keeps the large magnetic fields associated with bass energy out of the treble cable, allowing the delicate upper frequencies to travel a less magnetically disturbed path, like taking the waves out of the water when you swim.
AudioQuest Bass and GND-Tech (patented Ground-Noise Dissipation) attracts RF energy away from the amplifier’s output. When properly implemented, Bi-Wiring has always been a cost-effective way to get better performance for the same or less money. With GND-Tech, the advantage of Bi-Wiring is much more dramatic.
Dragon BASS cable is ideal for the Bass input of a Bi-Wire-able speaker in combination with a Dragon ZERO on the treble input. A Bi-Wire COMBO with BASS and ZERO cables joined together at the amplifier is usually the most convenient. When Tri-Wiring, use BASS cables on the Midrange and on the Bass inputs.
Caution: Do not Bi-Wire with two ZERO cables. Two or more ZERO cables in-parallel can create a very high-Frequency resonant peak (ringing), and resulting poor sound. On a Bi-Wired speaker, only use ZERO in combination with a BASS cable, otherwise us a single ZERO cable with jumpers.
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