AfterDark. Black River Series Constellation Network Cable Special Edit

AfterDark. Black River Series Constellation Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS) Network Cable is designed to connect the lan port B of EtherREGEN.

The very last mile for Audiophile Grade Network Cable to connect music steamer and audiophile network player.

The design is based on the unique material on outer layer, selection on lan cable, the wiring arrangement for 100M designed for EtherREGEN, the grounding arrangement and the brand selection on the RJ45 plug to provide the best contact on the Lan Port for EtherREGEN etc.

What is special about EtherREGEN Special Edition?

The cable is tailor made to use 4 wires for 100M instead of 8 wires for 1000M. This is important to know the Port B (isolated port) on Uptone EtherREGEN is running only 100M. So, the extra 4 wires is not used and may create cross talk / any EMI or current which creates interference when the data signal is being transfer from devices.

The braid of the cable for grounding is eliminated by isolated the grounding to touching the metal Telegartner Lan Plug. This arrangement can provide the cleanest isolated port B on UpTone EtherREGEN, most of the audiophile gear, network streamer can be improve sounding immediately without "ground loop" which is from grounding on chassis. The noise floor will be much quieter and details on background will improves.

Extra Ground Cable for Audiophile on Telegartner MFP8 Plug (Made in Germany) can tailor made to connect extra 0.5 meter grounding cable to connect Audiophile Ground Box, the noise will feed to the Ground Box.

Why use Ground Box's ? (Quoted from Entreq)

You will get an improvement in dynamic's, a lower noise floor and more natural flow in the sound.

For us a clean and effective ground point is one of the most important factor's in ensuring the best possible sonic platform for any hifi system!

We normally say 220V 50Hz alternative110 V 60Hz. But in our opinion there are a lot more frequence on the power net. These is caused by the way we connect zero and protective ground together in the main central/fuse boxes.Most things these days run on electricity. Current goes in and current goes out of devices and lighting fixtures of every kind. All of these make the current messy. Not least computers with their switched power units, chargers for e.g., mobile telephones, all the halogen and LED lighting, dimmers etc. all cause a great deal of high-frequency noise and stay voltages. This noise always seeks the easiest path to the earth. And since this can be everything from 50-60 Hz to very high-frequency, but weak, currents, it is not always certain that the path of least resistance is via the protective earth. These currents instead can find dishwashers, laundry machines, counter tops with water pipes, your HiFi rack and your stereo set with all the cables and devices as more attractive paths to the earth. Moreover, these stay voltages often generate very large magnetic fields that absolutely have influence on the sound reproduction.

One big problem is that the protective ground many time are overloaded or not constructed for handle this pollutions. It can handle a real "bang" of 110-220Volt and X Watts without any problems, but when it come to this small currents of some mV with very high frequency it don't catch them. So instead these will flow around in the power system searching for a place to ground. And in fact the protective ground can leak back a lot of pollutions to the power net that instead go to feed your HiFi system with all the cables and magnetic fields and load up and rest there in their search for ground.Our ground boxes / Eartha cables are designed to resemble and work like a bit of Mother Earth in concentrated form and offer the simplest and fastest route for this high-frequency noise to reach a earth point. Since such are very high-frequency weak currents, it is not necessary to have a lot of mass; but it is important that the cables are optimised for these high frequency and the ground box be a purely attractive earth point.The construction and choice of materials in the earth box has a crucial effect on the result. In part, the minerals and metals involved have an effect, but the relationship of proportion and distance between them also affects the result.

The EMI shielding material will be place inside the Telegartner MFP8 Plug, the high frequency and emi noise from the cable connector areas will absorb by the EMI shielding material made by KAMET Corporation.

Carbon Fiber Woven material will use for outer layer. This material can provide protection and lower the emi noise to get into the cable signal path.

Technical Specification:

First Layer of aluminum foils for 4 pairs of AWG23 0.57mm core cables, each pairs was covered by layer of aluminum foils with providing 100 % coverage to eliminate the interference between each pairs of core cables.

Superior dual-layer isolation, 1st Layer of aluminum foils for High Frequency (HF) Effective shielding. SFS-PE (Foam-Skin Polyethylene) insulated and 2nd layer of copper wire braiding. This will prevent external noise from getting to the signal conductors, shields the shield of the cable to further prevent the ingress of noise (RFI, etc.) into the signal wires.

Third Layer of Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS) Woven for EMI shielding, Carbon Fiber Woven outside protection provide the highest standard of shielding material which mainly used for industrial and most demanding engineer on special project.

“Extra Arrangement on Grounding Wire” the grounding braid outside of the lan cable was covered by 3M electric tape for insulated the braid touching the metal Telegartnar RJ45 Plug. This method is according to the best approach for UpTone EtherREGEN.

Oxygen Free Copper (OFC) conductors, 4 x 2 AWG 23/1, solid twisted single core pair.

High speed low-loss SFTP LSZH insulation: high quality insulation for cables that has less impact on the signal and insulates the conductors well. LSOH IEC 60332-1, Outer Dimension : 7.8mm

Category 7 RJ45 connector: Telegartner MFP8 Plug (Made in Germany) gold-plated conductor pins enclosed inside the extruding solid spring steel, safety pressured plug not only tighten but also provide moderate contact force for mission critical device, the highest standard for Audio Grade connector.

All hand Made in Hong Kong by AfterDark.

Review:

AfterDark Constellation (CFS) CAT 7 Lan Cable is designed for critical application with extremely low-jitter, bit-perfect communication which can only be made by hand carefully one by one.

As we know audiophile who required their music production to have better sense of space in the soundstage with exceptional clarity and delicate resolution reproduction. The digital source and the path of the network play an important roles even, it cannot be fully explained with modern computer engineering theory.

Shop owner was very aware of how important a clean ground plane is in digital audio. Because it acts as the reference for every calculation of voltage in the digital audio system, the cleaner you can keep your ground plane, the cleaner your audio will sound thanks to the prevention of significant amounts of jitter and noise. As a result, we have introduce the Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS) technology for our product line from power cable to digital cables.

The Constellation (CFS) CAT 7 Lan Cable is a big step to apply the CFS to keep the signal cleaner and eliminate the noise by apply third layers of shielding, just to ensure the digital signal is always in optimal level.

“Connecting The Constellation Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS) Network Cable brought a depth and timbre presentation to my music that I haven’t heard before” The audiophile after listening with the cable.

“Definitely, the Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS) do have very positive impact on any digital cables, like network cable and USB cable”

After applying Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS) to the cable, the signal is unchanged in its overall character / signature, but everything just got clearer and more open. There was more space in the sound, both in the overall size of the soundstage, but also in terms of the space around each instrument / sound.

By apply Carbon Fiber Shielding (CFS), it improve isolated ground plane allowing every sound to be more accurately transfer with no hash / background noise to muddy the end signal.

The Constellation (CFS) CAT 7 Lan Cable can help to prevent noise from reaching your network player so an audiophile DAC will benefit from a carbon fiber shielding cable upgrade. In fact, any affordable DAC will generally handle noise worse than an expensive DAC so the good network cable may be even more important.