SOLID 0.5% SILVER CONDUCTORS: Solid conductors eliminate strand-interaction distortion and reduce jitter. Solid silver-plated conductors are excellent for very high-frequency applications, like USB audio. These signals, being such a high frequency, travel almost exclusively on the surface of the conductor. As the surface is made of high-purity silver, the performance is very close to that of a solid silver cable, but priced much closer to solid copper cable. This is an incredibly cost effective way of manufacturing very high-quality USB cables.
HARD-CELL FOAM INSULATION: Hard-Cell Foam insulation is used exclusively in most of AudioQuests video and digital audio cables. Similar to Foamed-PE, it is nitrogen injected to create air pockets. Hard foam is used because the stiffness of the material allows the conductors in the cable to maintain the same relationship with each other along the full length of the cable, thus ensuring that the characteristic impedance of the cable is consistent.
TERMINATIONS: Precision gold-plated plugs are carefully attached with the very best solder. Through choice of flux and metallurgy, AQ solder has been optimized to make a low-distortion connection. The difference you hear between solders is a result of connection quality. AQ solder does not have a high silver content because the more silver there is in solder, the more difficult it is to make a good connection.
SUPERSPEED USB 3.0: Specifies data-transfer rates up to 4.8Gbps vs. Hi-Speed USB 2.0s maximum signaling rate of 480Mbps.