I recall my first upgraded power cable, hooked up to my Stax headphone amp. I was sceptical and would not pay more than $50.00 as an experiment. I was surprised just how much benefit it gave, increased dynamics and bass in particular. I assumed it had something to do with its greater thickness allowing more current to pass, something which would be most noticeable for peaks of volume which would explain bass and dynamics.
I mean we don't use skinny power cords in heavy duty applications. I assume that sometimes at least, such as for spikes in volume, our audio systems are working as heavy duty systems and need heavier cords.
However years later I still wait for any measurements to back this up or to show anything happening. And yet there is a significant industry devoted to power cords, conditioners and the like. Surely someone has data somewhere.
I worked with the electrical engineers, for almost 6 years as a post-doc, and I saw them regularly doing basic measurements of electrical properties. So why is the audio field so lousy about basic measurements such as power handling characteristics of cords..
Note that I don't expect data proving that humans can hear or prefer such things. As a one-time experimental psychologist working in human perception I know how difficult it is to get clean data from messy human subjects, and I frankly don't expect to find it in this field.
I recall in that one of the PhD. engineering students in the lab I worked in was the first person to come up with measurements of the interaural amplitude differences needed to give a sense of direction in stereo hearing. You can't get much more basic than this in the science of stereo yet this work wasn't done until the early 1970's. However I don't believe he published these results even though he ended up as a professor at MIT.
Of course my other main beef is the stupid "it's all in your head" type of explanation. In this instance the problem was that a good cable gave bad results. This is the opposite of confirmation bias so this was obviously not what the person wanted to hear. It is no kind of explanation to glibly claim that we have good science here. We don't get too far beyond basic data in acoustics such as the stereo measurements noted above, before as one of my profs used to say, there is a lot we don't know before we don't know that.
