+1 clearthink. On your last three posts. Regarding our decorum here and the clear evidence of so many with first hand experience. Thanks
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.
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.
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pkvintage"What happens when you plug an expensuve power chord into a cheap power bar that is plugged into a $1.00 wall socket?" What happens when you put bicycle tires on a Ferrari? What happens when you try to run Photoshop on Windows 3 with 3 megs of RAM? What happens if you try to stream hi-res using a dial-up connection? |
pkvintage39 posts12-24-2018 10:52amYou may/will still hear a difference from your system. If the power cord is designed to be connected to a piece of digital equipment like a CDP, Dac, or CD transport the chances are greater of hearing the difference, jmho. As for improving the parts of the AC power delivery system it’s all cumulative. The branch circuit wiring, there in, a dedicated branch circuit. The type of wiring used and the wiring method used in installing the branch circuit wiring. Quality of wall receptacle used. You don’t need to spend big bucks on an audio grade outlet to hear an improvement over a cheap residential grade outlet. Even the receptacle cover plate can make a difference. . |
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. So, lets separate out audible quality from theory. Here, I do not discuss audible benefit, just theory. I call what the OP posited the multi-way cable theory. While it’s interesting, and I’ve seen a number of manufacturers take similar ideas either with Litz wiring, or with super low metal content connectors, I think it’s important to talk about how most linear power supplies work. First, the incoming supply is 50 Hz or 60 Hz. That’s the signal you want to reach the power supply, so you do NOT want high frequencies coming in or going out. Anything besides these 50/60 Hz is noise and distortion. Next, the power supply itself acts as an extreme low pass filter. It is trying to remove everything above DC. Again, you do NOT want high frequencies passing through it. In a separate thread there was an electrical engineer discussing how noise would make it past the power supply. Making power cables like you do audio cables (i.e. super transparent) would only make that worse. Now, OP, I’m not arguing whether your power cables made a difference. I’m only arguing that the idea of transparency in a power cable is probably not you are liking about them. In fact, I might argue that a cable with some impedance, and built in noise filtering is a better way to go. I don't think that helping different bands be more transparent by itself would work. But!! There's this idea of laminar flow in fluids which is interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminar_flow You can watch a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=990jkBGHaVk&feature=youtu.be The idea is that water can flow without turbulence, like if it was in layers, and each layer flowed independently of every other layer. That to me seems a better outcome for us in power cables. It would be interesting to consider that it's' not about high and low frequencies, but about laminar flow of electrons through a conductor. Of course, there are probably good theories which say it's' irrelevant, having to do with the speed of electrons vs. the speed of the electrostatic field, etc. but there are also some very interesting ways an enterprising soul could use to test if this was in fact working. I will state clearly I do not know. I wish I had time /energy/equipment to measure this, as it would be a fascinating new tool in cable design. Best, E |
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