Why Power Cables Affect Sound


I just bought a new CD player and was underwhelmed with it compared to my cheaper, lower quality CD player. That’s when it hit me that my cheaper CD player is using an upgraded power cable. When I put an upgraded power cable on my new CD player, the sound was instantly transformed: the treble was tamed, the music was more dynamic and lifelike, and overall more musical. 

This got me thinking as to how in the world a power cable can affect sound. I want to hear all of your ideas. Here’s one of my ideas:

I have heard from many sources that a good power cable is made of multiple gauge conductors from large gauge to small gauge. The electrons in a power cable are like a train with each electron acting as a train car. When a treble note is played, for example, the small gauge wires can react quickly because that “train” has much less mass than a large gauge conductor. If you only had one large gauge conductor, you would need to accelerate a very large train for a small, quick treble note, and this leads to poor dynamics. A similar analogy might be water in a pipe. A small pipe can react much quicker to higher frequencies than a large pipe due to the decreased mass/momentum of the water in the pipe. 

That’s one of my ideas. Now I want to hear your thoughts and have a general discussion of why power cables matter. 

If you don’t think power cables matter at all, please refrain from derailing the conversation with antagonism. There a time and place for that but not in this thread please. 
128x128mkgus
In my system different power cords make the system sound different. This is my observation and is not my imagination.

I hypothesize the difference is due to the “skin effect”. Apparently higher frequencies of A/C conduct more readily over a thinner layer at the surface of a conductor, while lower frequencies conduct over a thicker layer from the surface to core. Based on this, the proportion of conductor surface area (high frequency preference) to conductor volume (low frequency preference) will change the frequency dependent conductance of the power cord.  

Or something like that. 
Sorry to inform but there is no electron transfer through wire. Electrons are for all intents and purposes stationary. What IS traveling through the wires is photons, which makes sense, right?
Dude, really???

I know that this is Audiogon but bad science is bad.  FYI, current is not composed of photons.  Electrons and photons ARE NOT the same:
1. Electrons have mass.  Photons have no measurable mass.
2. Electrons are negatively charged particles.  Photons have no measurable charge.
3. Electron mobility (speed) can vary from (effectively) zero to almost (but never reaching) the speed of light (c).  Photons always travel at c in a vacuum and very close to c in other media.
4. Spin (s) for an electron is assigned at 1/2.  s for a photon is assigned as 1.
5. Electrons have an associated antiparticle, positrons.  Photons do not have an associated antiparticle and are created by the annihilation of particles and antiparticles.

Current is composed of electrons, not photons.  It's true that electrons do not travel very far or very fast in a conductor, but they do travel.

I thought this was an audiophile site?!? It reads more like a “audio on the cheap“ site...  
Unfortunately, in today’s high end audio market, there are entirely too many opportunities to spend vast amounts of money for no effect whatsoever. When I started with the hobby fifty years ago, it was a tech hobby, where you learned the basic laws of electronics and acoustics and expected the manufacturers to use those laws in their products. Today, you can spend a thousand dollars on a power cord without the manufacturer providing any grounded theory as to why it is superior to a standard 12ga 15 amp IEC cord. You are just told it sounds better, or fed some marketing mumbo jumbo. Well of course it sounds better; if you parted with $1K for the cord, obviously your system will be improved. It’s called confirmation bias. This kind of stuff has been around for a long time. A hundred years ago, it was called Patent Medicine. 


@mkgus


This got me thinking as to how in the world a power cable can affect sound. I want to hear all of your ideas.



Ok. Here’s one: It could be your perception that changed, not the actual sound. Bias, expectation effect, imagination, etc. There are many biases - "expectation bias" being one well known bias where you expect the "better" or more expensive item to perform better and...viola!...it does!

But a very important point to absorb is that such expectation bias is not at all the whole story in terms of explaining perceptual phenomena. Even if you don’t go in with an opinion either way that A will sound better, or even different, than B, the mere act of focusing your attention to look for differences can in of itself cause the perception of the sound to "change." This is amply demonstrated by blind tests were you don’t switch between A and B but the subject thinks you are switching. Often enough they’ll choose one as sounding better than the "other" even though they are listening to the same thing.

And you don’t even have to be in the mindset of looking for a difference to go awry in your inferences. Again, our minds and nervous system are quite plastic and for a myriad of reasons something can please one day, but not another. So someone can put on his system and find "I like the way it sounds today better than I did yesterday." And then he can *presume* that this alteration in perception had an objective source, so "something changed in the system, not me." "Oh...little did I know I’d left X tweak on the component" or whatever, so THAT must have caused the system to sound better *even though I wasn’t trying to perceive any differences!*

Our senses and cognition are amazing. But far from perfect. And unfortunately they introduce these types of variables in to the problem of trying to ascertain what’s happening in any perceptual pursuit. You can just ignore this, as many do. But if we want to really be careful about trying to understand the nature of an apparent change, the ideal method takes perceptual bias and error into account.

As I’ve written before several times: I once thought an expensive power cord "obviously" changed the sound of my system.

But...I knew that as compelling as my subjective experience was, I could be in error. When I blind tested it against a cheap power cord, every "obviously different" aspect of it’s sound from the cheap power cord vanished. Trying to tell a difference was utterly random. To engage in blind testing is to get a real lesson in the power of perceptual bias.Many assume perceptual biases produce only very subtle effects. No, they can be quite profound.


Now...that ISN’T to say other explanations aren’t correct, and that the power cord did in fact alter the signal audibly in the way you perceived.

But, if you are really that interested in the truth of your experience, I think the above is well worth considering.

Personally, though I am open to the idea of AC cables changing the sound, I am at this point skeptical due to my own experience with them, particularly the lessons learned blind testing those and other items, and because the claims made by manufacturers are of a frankly suspicious nature - claims made about technical problems in AC causing audible problems, but virtually never objective evidence for the product’s claims in the audio domain.And over the years I’ve seen electrical engineers (who don’t have a vested interest in selling cables) eviscerate many of the fishy claims by AC cable manufacturers.

Hey...you asked... ;-)

Cheers.