Cardas Clear Beyond Power Cord

Clear Beyond comes standard with Cardas E-5 Power connectors, featuring copper blades & clips, plated with rhodium over silver.

Clear Beyond is specially designed for high-current components like power amplifiers and graduate progressively in size and degree of filtration from Clear M to Clear to Clear Beyond. The filtration is similar in all three cords using a combination of a toroidal filter and graduated conductor lay length variation to cancel out-of-band material. The larger cords have more layers and progressively greater lay length variation. Clear Beyond provides broadband filtering on all three legs through a hybrid process that incorporates a tuned toroidal filter and multipath-canceling conductors in a flexible low resistance package. 

"The Mirror of Clear Speaker Cable"

According to George Cardas, "Clear power cable is in fact the mirror of Clear Speaker cable. Clear cables are designed to pass the smallest of changes unfettered by time smear, and this is accomplished by carefully matching the propagation constants of the cable.

"Clear power cables actually are designed to deliver smooth 60-cycle power while smoothing out the artifacts," George explained. "We achieve this in part by deliberately smoothing the power signal and muffling the noise circulating in the power system using a controlled mismatch of signal propagation."

Cardas Clear Technology

Cardas Clear cables use newly applied technology that is George Cardas' breakthrough solution to the smeared, unfocused sound that's inherent in standard cable designs. Cardas Clear uses Matched Propagation Conductors to deliver what George calls "an unprecedented window of clarity."

"Clear represents the best of Cardas," reports Alan Sircom in issue 66 of HiFi+ magazine, "so if you are already impressed with Cardas but want more, Clear could be the first, 'last' upgrade you make, sure in the knowledge that however high up the audiophile ladder you climb, Clear will be there, waiting for you to catch up."

The Lagging Charge

At very high frequencies, cables can appear to propagate faster because the slower dielectric materials don't have the time to charge at very high frequencies, and the lag is diminished.

At audio frequencies, however, this lag creates a noticeable problem. That's why dielectric manufacturers may brag about what their dielectrics will do at a million cycles per second, but don't talk about what they do at a thousand cycles per second, where the negative effects are audible. Jitter is one directly observable artifact of this conductor/dielectric relationship.

Some cable manufacturers try to compensate for this differential lagging in a cable by adding an electrical network (for example, by using a load coil), but the damage has already been done. Once the low level information in the signal has been smeared, it is lost and cannot be recovered. 

The Matched Propagation Solution

Since the so-called 'charge propagation velocity' of the dielectric can never equal the speed of electrical changes in the conductors, George Cardas' ingenious solution with Cardas Clear cables is to slow the conductor to match the rate of the dielectric.

In a concentrically stranded conductor with individually coated strands (such as the constant "Q" conductor used in Cardas cables) the vector velocity and decay time of the conductor can be matched to that of the dielectric by controlling the lay length progression (twists per inch or TPI) of successive strand layers.

A matched propagation velocity conductor of this type, as used in Cardas Clear cables, mitigates the effects of capacitance much as a load coils do, but it does this continuously in the cable rather than at intervals. Eliminating the time delay between storage elements in the cable itself eliminates the bandwidth and dynamic range limitation seen in periodically loaded cables.

A Huge Dynamic Range of Resolution

Clear has a constant transfer characteristic, exponentially lower resonance, and a huge dynamic range of resolution. Its Matched Propagation Conductors maintain low-level information and natural transients in a way that no other cable can. It does not exaggerate the leading edge of the signals or smear low-level information as conventional conductors do. Clear maintains the overall time signature of the original sound elements making it easier to pick out what George Cardas calls "the head in the choir or the emotion in the individual voice."