Power Cables and Wall Sockets

I was introduced to the benefits of power cords in the early 90’s, by my good friend and audio mentor Stewart Marcantoni. Caelin Gabriel located Shunyata here to be close to Stewart who lived at the time in Bremerton. Caelin brought some of his early Shunyata Powersnakes to my place for a party/listening session one time. Half the people were audiophiles, the rest mostly cycling buddies or coworkers. It was a trip to see the reaction of people who couldn’t imagine a pc could do anything try and get their mind around how much better it sounds. They ALL heard it. 
 

One of my first component mods was to replace the rubber pc on a Basis turntable motor with a cheap expendable pc. When even the cheapest pc I had ($75) was clearly better I knew for sure this is for real. 

When it says on my system page “everything matters” it means everything. Earlier this year I cut the end off a very good prototype pc eager to hear how much it would improve my Origin Live Sovereign turntable. I was underwhelmed. Puzzled, is more like it. Why on earth? (And so much for expectation bias!) This pc was quite stiff. Isolation is incredibly important. I reduced the number of conductors, trying to make it more flexible. No go. 
 

Finally I thought maybe the last few inches isolation is far more important than wire? So I replaced the last few inches with ordinary 14 ga wire, soldered a IEC connector a few inches from the motor pod and mounted the end in a suspended isolation rigged to the rack. Now I can swap power cords on the turntable just like any other component. And with isolation now out of the picture guess what? Power cord matters after all. 
 

People have all kinds of theories as to why. They will tell you oxygen free this, long grain crystal that, quantum tunnel whatever. This is all for show. Truth is the last thing in the world they will ever tell you is the truth. Because the day we all know how to make a cable that sounds as good as some of these incredible things I have heard, is the end of making a nice living off it. 
 

Please note: they earn it. Look at what I have had to do just to figure out how to make one tiny little thing better. Look around how rare that is. Had to learn a lot, including how to listen for and evaluate an insanely huge number of sonic attributes. They aren’t all great, but to make even one good one they had to make a hundred duds. So it ain’t all gravy. 
 

And yes, they do work and no, it’s not in my head. 

🙄

There is a hazard in drawing conclusions from composition of a component. Ultimately it is the overall design and components, and how they work together. The AudioQuest Hurricane is the best power cord I have heard. As Millercarbon points out…. It takes an lot of effort and experimentation to determine ideal configurations.

There are a couple ways at looking at the sound of PC, interconnects and cables. In general, and in a specific system. I have extensively used a dozen brands. You can bucket them into increasing quality… quieter, more dynamic… etc. So you go form ok to great… then there is how they do in your system. One might slightly tip the tonal balance and another not. So, to me the AudioQuest Hurricane is a very high performance power cord and it is also very suitable in my system.

hey guys,

here's something interesting I just found out straight out of the mouth from audioquest, they don't even use OCC single crystal wire they're using crappy OFHC wire and ripping people off for $28,000 for speaker wire what a joke these wire companies are everyone knows that OCC single crystal is far superior to anything ofc on the market and rectangular OCC is even better than round OCC, companies like audioquest transparent MIT are all just ripoff artist selling cheap crappy ofc wire for exorbitant amounts. wake up people, if you don't know by now that OCC is far superior to ofc you're a lost cause.

https://www.gcaudio.com/tips-tricks/why-power-cables-make-a-difference/