Cable Costs Relative to System

Carl Wrote:

...I will endeavour to listen and compare PC's when I can and trust my ears, which is I guess all any of us can do."

Good for you Carl.

I trust you'll hear the importance of what good AC cords can bring to the table. When you experience that, remember this that I'll share with you: First, cables are not a "tweak" as it appears you suggest. A tweak (or an accessory) is something your system can perform with or without. Equipment is stuff that your system needs in order to function. Cables are equipment. In context of that, I've firmly come to the conclusion that good AC cords are foundational to a music system. Before any other partnering cabling, they can begin to show what a given music system is capable of.

Sound crazy? Yea, I suppose so. We expect to be emotionally impacted by out system's playback. Not so much intellectually stimulated by understanding all the whys of performance. Like going to a good concert - You come away with "Man...that was Good!" Not "Boy...that was Right!" Easy enough to understand to some degree why S/Cs or I/Cs might contribute to our emotional experience without becoming an EE. Simple as they may seem, AC cords a another story. It doesn't as readily make sense that a power cord can do wonders for a system. They need to be looked at differently than S/Cs or I/Cs. Understandably, many enthusiasts don't care to know all the intellectual reasons why an AC cord can allow a system to operate more efficiently. After a ragged day at work, most of us just want to settle down with maybe a good glass of wine and be emotionally nurtured with some good music. Not come home and do more work by testing dielectrics for capacitors, write the charts of our music collection or study wire theories. We really don't care so much if we can grasp all the workings of our music system. It's more about "Is this thing making music magical to me?". Add power cords as an important means to get there.

You might get a kick out of this: Some years ago, I dismissed the importance of power cords. Hell, almost twenty years ago I dismissed wire period. Today, I place AC cords at the top of cable or system hierarchy. That's quite a turn about. As it goes on these boards sometimes, I can hear it - Perhaps one would say of cable manufacturers (us included) "Well duh!, you make yer bucks from sellin' cables. You gotta promote AC cords." That's not true - take AC cords out of a product line and, if you're good at what you do, you'd still have a business that's worth the effort and that makes a good difference for folks. I would also counter by saying that many passionate high end manufacturers produce products out of what they themselves use. Not what can I make to turn a buck. They trust their "creation" would be of value to others and offer it in the market place. The market bears whether there's any value of one's efforts and the buck takes care of itself. Win/Win for everyone.

Anyway, I hope there's a bit of insight for you here. Let us know what you find when you get to auditioning some power cords. Might be useful for others.

Cheers!

Robert
RSAD

Here is another angle on how to consider power cords and why they affect our systems. Robert commented on thinking of the cable as a circuit, perhaps a different word for the same concept is a filter. I have a friend who first introduced this word to me a few years ago to describing audio cables. (Power, interconnects and speaker cables) Here is the logic and why this word made sense to me.

A cable can not "add" to the signal, it is only able to degrade the signal. In the perfect world the signal would be carried from point "A" to point "B" with no alteration. I hope we can all agree this is not functionally possible, although we might read various hype that claims to have solved it.

The fact is, no matter how a cable is constructed, it will have some impact on the signal being carried. The wire matters, the gauge and make up both affect the signal. The dialectic (material around the wire) impacts the signal as it possesses different electrical "storage" potential, thus altering the signal electrically. The shielding will affect the signal "electrically" and shield the signal from outside interference.

Please understand my lay person logic and language towards these issues. I am not an engineer or even a simply electrical hobbyist. My views are quite naive, I understand this. Please look beyond this for the concept and not attack me for misusage of the words I chose to relay the concept.

It all matters, in the example of power cable, the newest designs are quite elaborate in their designs. The weave or braid being incorporated to bundle wires are often very complex and have sound logic in noise rejection. Not only are these configured as a straight filter in the wire interface, but they often have very elaborate dielectric and shielding designs that both reject outside interference and absorb line bound noise within the conductor.

I realize the science to explain the concepts being developed are behind the actual practice. In audio I believe the hobbyist often discovers things through trial and error. This is then elaborated on through the hobbyist, and eventually an engineer might try to explain what is happening. The problem many of the scientist are having (In my opinion) is the language does not yet exist to describe what we hobbyists’ are hearing.

Now I understand this conversation has now gone into the place where arguments start, but this is not my intent. I am just trying to explain a concept that is very logical to me, and helps me move beyond the argument and “science” to the enjoy the result level.

I have a very dear old Audiogon friend in New Zealand who keeps in touch with me. He has been a DIY hobbyist for years, and through experimenting has developed some excellent results. He was at lunch one day and the topic of cable performance came up. Well, one thing lead to another, but the result was he ended up meeting with a professor at the University in Auckland. This man has been researching the science behind the very issues we have been arguing over for the past ten years. Turns out there is A LOT of science behind what we are hearing. In a quantum physics world, micro and nano vibration have measurable affects on electrical signals. These affects have not been explained because first we did not know they existed, and secondly we had no equipment to measure it.

The point is, this man plans on publishing a paper regarding exactly what we have been asking for, but his findings will not be released for about a year. It turns out there are many scientists in our Universities who are studying these issues to help resolve signal transfer brought on by nano technology. The smaller the circuit for example, the larger the quantum noise and movements affect the circuit. Perhaps the most logical example is with nano tubes. When an electrical signal is passed through a nano tube , the electrons that were in a complex interaction all line up and quite down. This of course will reduce heat (which is primarily what these scientist are concerned with) but it will also reduce noise. I do not know how much the noise issue will be of interest to these scientists, but it is of interest to us.

Of course one man amongst us has understood these concepts for many years. Jack Bybee has developed products that work on quantum noise. The sad thing is instead of embracing this man, we ridiculed him because he had no science. Fact is he has a great deal of science behind his thinking, and fact is much of it remains classified.

The point is, the science and measurements are being worked on. Now my question is; should we ignore the results we hear because the science is lagging behind? Or should we continue to experiment through the hobbyist mentality of trial and error and enjoy the results of our fellow hobbyists‘?

Robert is one of these men who chose to embrace the results of his experiments and chose to share these findings with the community by starting a company. This is how 90% of this hobby is developed and how it advances.

My concept is to enjoy the results. The science will come, but to simply ignore the elephant in the room because no one knows what it is or how to explain its existence is a bit silly. Some day we will have the evolutionary classification behind the elephant, and we will have volumes of documentation to describe how this beast came to be, and how to measure it scientifically, but for now I am just going to accept that it indeed exists, and that is really all the proof I need.

jd

To inpepinnovations@aol.com,
I contact Don at DCCA Audio and specify how I want my PC's to sound and he makes them for me exactly how I ask. Thats how.

Joeyboynj, How does one go about specifying desired cable performance? Does one merely provide one's equipment make, model number(s), and any available specs? Since the consensus is that cables are component or system-dependant, how does a cable designer/manufacturer guarantee a cables performance without utilizing the customers actual components?

Just curious how the process works.

So, Joeyboynj, Don knows how those effects work, but is keeping it secret from you?

Bob P.