Have you been surprised by power cable changes? s

I have training in electrical engineering as part of one of my doctorates - I am a professor at a medical school. I am an experimentalist as well as a theorist. 

My audio system is relatively expensive, all digital with a master clock. The power cord and the ground station made a huge difference, as did the power cord to the master clock and the BNC digital cable from the master clock to the DAC/CD/SACD/network player configuration. 

My experience was that the line was quite noisy including injection of noise from the components, but now there is no noise and all recordings (streamed or from a hard copy) sound spectacular. I think that folks with very inexpensive audio systems may not experience the benefit of expensive cords and many who are critical of such upgrades do not actually listen to music with the same intensity that we do...

Appeal to Authority alert! 🚨

😛

I was not surprised with the improvements brought to SQ with power cord upgrades bc of the authoritative experiences of so many posters on this site, and the very basic understanding that everything that makes these black boxes work is driven by power ('cept for maybe the cartridge but I don't know anything about those yet), and power like anything can have induced variability in countless ways for countless reasons, none of which could help with the fidelitious reproduction of music.  Wouldn't good cord design help remove or avoid some of that? 

Plus I did one a/b comparison and yeah, no reason to even try a again other than staying objective with the methodology. 

A tougher question for those with limited time and money is what's the best bang for the buck with their chosen equipment?  How do you know you've gone far enough on the cost/return curve and it's time to move on to something else?  I could in theory spend the next several months comparing power cords, conditioners, receptacles, noise reducers and whatnot, but would this be time well spent or not compared to say room treatments or other cables or isolation devices?

And btw I loved the straw analogy, I will be using that one for sure! 

I don't mean to be combative, but I just don't see how a large wire gauge power cord can supply more power to your amplifier than a smaller gauge power cord as long as both power cords have equal or larger size wire than what is the wall from the circuit breaker to the outlet. 

It would seem that putting a larger pipe on a smaller supply pipe couldn't increase the available supply. Am I missing something? 

Gary

gakman

...I just don't see how a large wire gauge power cord can supply more power to your amplifier than a smaller gauge power cord as long as both power cords have equal or larger size wire than what is the wall from the circuit breaker to the outlet ...

I don't think anyone here has claimed otherwise.