"Very Dynamic Sound Quality and Huge Soundstage"
Carbon 8 speaker cable from Kimber Kable is a nimble ninja. It confidently and quietly connects your gear from the shadows. Music springs forth from the darkness as this cable stealthily reveals the details of your music from your desktop loudspeakers and monitors.
"The Carbon 8 and 16 share some characteristics, both are very neutrally balanced, both detailed and both deliver a very dynamic sound quality and huge soundstage with positively almost visible gaps between instruments," reports Ken Stokes in his Hi-fi Pig review for February 19, 2020.
Carbon 8 boasts sophisticated VariStrand copper conductors in an 8-wire counter opposed helix array and a low loss fluorocarbon dielectric. Kimber's patented Varistrand™ technology incorporates specifically selected strand gauges within one conductor made from hyper-pure copper with a carbon-infused conductive polymer finish. The cable also uses an electrostatically dissipative carbon polymer and is finished using nitrogen assisted hand soldered termination.
The Carbon-Series Advantage
A major feature – and a completely new direction for Kimber – is the use of carbon in these cables. The conductors are pure, VariStrand copper over which a carbon-infused conductive polymer is pressure-applied.
The polymer fills the spaces in between the strands helping to maintain the geometry and means that the stranded conductors behave more like a solid core conductor (a benefit), while retaining its flexibility. The copper conductors and carbon polymer are then insulated in the conventional way with Kimber’s Fluorocarbon (Teflon) insulation.
The Carbon polymer reduces mechanically-induced noise and improves the performance of the outer Teflon insulating material.
Attention to Detail
A feature of Kimber’s Axios headphone cables has been the development of a braiding machine which is able to maintain the famous weave at the point at which the braid splits into two, and this design has been carried over to the new Carbon cables.
Instead of simply twisting the wires together for the positive and negative halves of the speaker cables, the braid is maintained at the breakout. The interconnect consists of a single wire carrying both left and right channels which similarly branches out to both channels with no break at the junction and preservation of the braid.
