Astin Trew Concord USB cable

Over the past decade we've seen many audiophiles ditching there once loved CD players in favor of using their computer as their source, this is all well and good as it is a extremely comfortable way of accessing all of your music, the popularity of computer has escalated with the amount of new DACs now on the market, but there is one huge problem when it comes to computer audio and that is they simply were not designed in most cases with audio in mind, our computers are very noisy environments, audiophile sound quality was not really in the minds of modern day computers designs, computers were not designed for high quality audio.

 With all this dirt and noise generated by our computers we see some companies making steps to try to make the signal to our DACs less contaminated.   For example KingRex have gone down the route of supplying battery power to their UD384 DAC, while Japanese brand Acoustic Revive has designed a very effective USB isolator.

 Now we have a exciting new product from AstinTrew, theBritish manufacture of highly affordable hifi products. The concord USB power cable is very unique in it's design.

Almost all USB receiver chips in DAC's (regardless of the price of the DAC) are powered by the 5V line through the USB cable from the sending device (PC/laptop/streamer etc.); and this results in degraded audio performance. It is well known that clean and stable power supplies are essential for a high quality and true musical performance; and power leads in close physical contact with data leads, as in most USB cables can also degrade the signal, or add noise to the music signal.
The Concord powered USB cable removes the power cable right away from the data lines (they meet just at the USB input plug) and uses a patented power supply design, offering COMPLETE isolation from the mains supply - offering an ultra low noise regulated 5V to power the USB input chipset. The earth line and power are therefore separated from the data line.
This cable option uses a very high quality coaxial pair of true 90 Ohm cables (1.4mtr. long), with a PTFE dielectric between data and screen. Most USB cables are manufactured with twisted pairs of data and earth, and are not 90 Ohm. The send and receive USB chipsets are specified to require a 90 Ohm connection for optimum quality signal transmission. The Concord USB cable offers exactly that, for minimum data transmission distortion.