1. Home
  2. cables
  3. 141153-122613

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. 
mkgus
elizabeth
6,726 posts
 
Seventeen Furutech GTX duplex                                      
Fourteen Pangea powercords                                        
Two Furutech plugged powercords 32 ft and 44 ft long.           
Two power conditionerstwo home made extension cords, Furutech plugs.              
five PS Audio Noise Harvesters                      
All of my AC for the stereo.
jafreeman's avatar
jafreeman
448 posts
 
"First, a poster quoted ARC, a respected audio company and unless I am mistaken twisted the quote badly to suit this discussion. The paragraph he quoted from ARC referenced specifically speaker wire and interconnects. Not power cords."  xyobgyn

Yes, that was me, and yes, you are mistaken.  See my subsequent post on the Sainline AC cords ARC has used at the factory to test their designs. Look at the Sainline Systems site for that verification by Warren Gehl, chief listener for ARC product design and every piece that leaves the factory.  He uses high-quality AC cords in the ARC factory listening room!  
jafreeman's avatar
jafreeman
448 posts
 
"If one were to grant that a PC can change the resulting sound of a system.... one has to posit that there is intrinsically “something” we are essentially conditioning or altering coming in from the wall current." xyobgyn

Yes, that "something" IS the electrical current that courses through your system and wires and into your speakers. Upon that current resides the audio signal you like to hear. If the current is kept free of noise and distortion, you hear more of the signal. An EE may say the current has been filtered through many phases of circuit and the AC cord does not matter. Empirically, those of us who are not EE’s are experiencing that high-quality AC cords, interconnects, speaker wires and fundamentally-important isolation transformers are bringing sound quality to much higher levels of enjoyment. At the expense of sounding naive, I have concluded that there must be a burden of distortion that must be shared by the audio signal all the way through the system. Otherwise, an AC cord would not matter, but it does.
elizabeth
6,726 posts
 
I mentioned one of the ways I think there are changes to the power itself that go unrecognized is the fuzzyness of the wave form. I call it being thick, or thin (usually thin is too thin sounding. thick is fuzzy sounding..) There is no measurement for this, but is part of distortion.An analogy is a audio wave diffuse or coherent..
xyobgyn's avatar
xyobgyn
23 posts
 
I’m not mistaken, here is your quote:

IMPORTANT: Use the best available speaker wires and interconnects. Audio Research cannot emphasize this enough. As better components and systems are developed, it becomes increasingly important to avoid the limitations of inferior system interconnections. 

I trust you’ve copied what ARC has in their insert correctly. I believe it’s a valuable contribution to a discussion about what ARC believes the end user should consider for speaker wires and interconnects. But it doesn’t seem to apply to this thread.

It is your quote, not mine.

I am surprised no one else picked up on this.  An interesting poll would be to see if any companies include on paper, in their user instructions, opinions that one should invest in the best possible or best matching PC to go with their amp, preamp, DAC, Turntable or whatever? 

I know it doesn’t settle the question posed my the OP, “How do PC change the sound?


More to discover