Forest
Forest HDMI embodies all of AudioQuest’s core philosophies on cable design. Forest employs solid Long-Grain Copper conductors, Solid High-Density Polyethylene Insulation, and precise signal geometry. Specific attention has been paid to maximizing the performance of HDMI, and indeed, AudioQuest’s HDMI cables push sonic performance to new levels.
Forest HDMI
Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications, like HDMI audio and video. These signals, being such a high frequency, travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor. As the surface is made of high-purity silver, the performance is very close to that of a solid silver cable, but priced much closer to solid copper cable. This is an incredibly cost effective way of manufacturing very high-quality HDMI cables.
Any solid material adjacent to a conductor is actually part of an imperfect circuit. Wire insulation and circuit board materials all absorb energy (loss). Some of this energy is stored and then released as distortion. Forest HDMI uses air-filled Foamed-Polyethylene Insulation because air absorbs next to no energy and Polyethylene is low-loss and has a benign distortion profile. Thanks to all the air in Foamed-PE, it causes much less of the out-of-focus effect common to other materials.
HDMI standards and capabilities have improved significantly since DVI first evolved into HDMI. All generations are backward compatible. However, not all previous HDMI cables can transmit the full 18Gbps of data required to optimize today’s HDMI 2.0 equipment. While there is currently no 4K/60 4:4:4 software requiring the full 18Gbps capability of HDMI 2.0, some sources (UHD Blu-ray players) can be set to upsample, requiring 18Gbps capability. (Upsampling often should be done in the TV rather than in a previous component — but that’s your decision.) The most important thing to know and understand is that all AudioQuest HDMI cables up to 8 meters are guaranteed to exceed the requirements for all possible HDMI 2.0/HDCP 2.2 data streams, including 4K UltraHD, HDR, and Blu-ray Ultra HD.
All AudioQuest HDMI cables up to 10 meters are rated High Speed with Ethernet. From 12 meters to 20 meters AudioQuest HDMI cables are Standard Speed with Ethernet.
All audio cables are directional. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. All signal conductors controlled for digital-audio direction in AudioQuest HDMI cables, and care is even taken to run the conductors used in the Audio Return Channel in the opposite direction to ensure the best performance for that application. Arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality.
