A lot of people are surprised to hear that gold or nickel plating makes no difference at all when it comes to sound quality. In truth, the use of gold plating in connector contacts is mostly driven by marketing appearance. Keep in mind that the audio signal travels through many substances as it moves from cable to connector to jack: wires, solder, internal connector contacts, external connector contacts, jack contacts, solder, circuit board, etc. In other words, most audio signals travel through a combination of copper, lead, tin, silver, brass, aluminum, nickel or gold before completing their journey. At A2Z Cables, we use high quality metal-shielded connectors and silver-content solder on all of our professional and premium grade audio cables to ensure optimal signal transmission and connectivity.

The large majority of audio cables today are analog audio cables, however digital cables are becoming popular recently. Basically, in analog audio sound travels in the form of electrical waves over copper cable. In digital audio sound travels in the form of 1's and 0's over copper or fiber optical cable. Digital audio over copper cable is often called SPDIF (75-ohm) or AES/EBU (110-ohm). Digital audio over fiber optical cable is often called Toslink or Digital Optical audio. Analog and digital audio ports cannot be connected together using cables but converters can be used to connect them together.

The circuitry in your powered audio devices can "improve" sound quality, but your cables cannot. This is because cables are passive components, not active. Also, you do not want low-tech cable companies trying to "improve" your sound, as this job belongs to the companies that make your active audio components like tuners, amps, pre-amps, cd players, speakers, etc. The perfect cable would simply move an audio signal from one end to the other unchanged. However, it is important to note here that cheap cable, poorly constructed cable, and the wrong cable type can "damage" sound quality, especially over longer distances.