Power Cord for Power Conditioner

I am not a bully and I have the right to voice my opinion without being bullied. The fact that I am standing up to the hoards of believers on this site should make a thinking person take note. It's easy for you with all of your supporters behind you to scoff at me but you have no standing outside the walls you are hiding behind here.

If I may reiterate for the folks who can't remember as far back as my earlier posts, I have tried high end power cords. I worked for a company that made them. I am in the audio business and have been for over 25 years. I rarely have to pay for any cables. The companies give them to you just to try them. I have two large drawers full of them.

You may actually think you can hear a difference with your so called high end cables but I don't believe you can and I have never met anyone else that could either. I think you believe you can hear differences which is fine because that's all that matters to you. But I don't want to see others waste money for audio products that don't really do anything. If someone asks an opinion about something I am qualified to answer I have the right to respond if I want just as you do, without getting nasty as you have.

I do not believe in magic and that is the only way a power cable of correct size can change the way a component sounds. You are asking, no demanding that I believe a power cord can someway do something to the electrical signal coming from the wall to improve it. How can it? What does it do? Speed it up, slow it down, increase it, decrease it, purify it some way. A power conditioner can filter out unwanted noise from the service but for a power cord to do that it would not be a power cord, it would be a conditioner and require much more than fancy wire inside. And I bet most of the high end cables out there are merely off the shelf wire that everyone else uses.

"as they are completely running around in circles with the same hollow arguments [which have been convincingly refuted] "

This is kind of neat I think.
Person 1 can read a thread and come to a strong and definitive conclusion.
Person 2 (me) can read the same thread and not see anything that would support the conclusion. There are the yes I can vs. no you can't comments but this seems (to me) to be a wash.

Apparently either person 2 is blinded by his biases or person 1 has biases which drive him to read things that aren't there.

As I'm not an outside and objective onlooker I can't speculate on which person is more correct, but it seems like we can perceive what we wish to in reading just like in hearing.

Rwwear,
I except the fact that you don`t hear differences among power cords regardless of their cost or construction, fair enough. But your attempts to tell others what they`ve heard based on their varied and personal experiences is absurd.

You have`nt made a strong case at all to this outside observer. The counter arguements and contrasting opinions are far more compelling and better stated.

You don`t believe in power cord performance differences, that`s cool, we get it already.

To answer the OP's question, no, it is not "absolutely" necessary to use any company's power cord with their power conditioner. However, good companies design their power-products with a technical goal in mind, intending them to be used as a system. I would suggest weighting your choice for a power cord toward the manufacturer of the power-distributor/conditioner while remaining open to other options.

It is surprising to still see so much argument over whether power cords make any difference in the first place, as well as whether they have any explainable technical or objective relevance. Not all people will hear a difference based on a host of variables and that's fine, but that is no reason to sling mud on others who do, or to state that _all power cords_ are a rip off and do nothing.

There is an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence from the world's foremost studios, mastering labs and electronics engineers --who evaluated and purchased after-market power cords for use in electronics design, film systems and for recording and mastering projects.

Dozens come to mind, including Sony, Bob Ludwig, Astoria, Skywalker and many others who carefully test _everything_ before buying. People convinced of conspiracy can always try to explain these away with more innuendo. They do exist however, and these professional sound engineers firmly believe in their value.

There is also easy to understand measurement data that shows dramatic differences between the average stock power cord and almost any well made (crimped and soldered 12 gauge or better) DIY or after-market power cord.

Yes, we measured this with an in-house designed peak-current analyzer but there is a common electricians measurement tool that provides almost identical measurement, absent some of the fine detail and scope. There will be an article on this fairly common device and its results published soon.

Whether these measurable differences can be directly linked to any one individual's experience in their own system with this or that make and model of power cord can be endlessly debated--which seems to be occurring here.

So, lets stick to a few facts:

A/V electronic power supplies pull current off the peak and trough of the AC sine-wave. Their rectifiers are switching on and off 120X per second. They are pulling current hard,--dynamically.

Compared to a simple motor or fan that pull current in an even flow, A/V power supplies are pulling impulse current in short, sharp bursts off the line. Any amp playing dynamic program material is a good example of this but all AV electronics are similar in the way current is received and processed.

For this reason, AV electronics are sensitive to in-line resistance to peak current. Meaning, the less impulse current that is put in front of the rectifiers when they open for each micro-second, the longer it takes to fill storage supply capacitors. For amps or passive power distributors that feed multiple components, we believe this is a very relevant measurement.

The vast majority of stock power cords have extremely high measurable resistance to peak-current. They are at best 14 gauge, but that's not their biggest liability regarding the efficiency of impulse-current and voltage delivery.

Common stock power cords are not using minimally crimped metal-metal connections, much less soldered ones. Their thin conductors simply rest against slits cut into the back of the three pins and then the mold itself holds the tiny connection points in place. That may be fine for a toaster-oven or your table lamp, but its objectively, measurably inferior when used with any good AV component power supply.

The _fact is_ that a 14 or 16 gauge stock power cord will drop close to, or more than 50% of available peak voltage and peak current that is measured at the wall outlet. No matter what the impulse current measurement is at your outlet, the majority of stock cords drop HALF of that. Now, whether one person or another can perceive a difference in sound or visual based on that objective difference can be debated, the measurement cannot.

Another fact is that you do not need a fancy (expensive) power cord to dramatically improve this measurement. Most crimped and soldered connection power cords of 12 gauge or better will improve peak current measurement significantly and yes, we believe that is related to sound and visual quality in a base-line manner.

There are many other considerations related to subjective performance of power cords in any single application, including component generated power supply noise and the radiated high-frequecy fields that are ever-present around electronics systems. Any decent quality, shielded or braided DIY design could address these issues, but there are also some good commercial designs from companies that know what they are doing.

Contrary to some peoples conclusions about commercial power-cord manufacturers, most are reputable, knowledgable people. There is the good and bad within all commercial categories of electronics manufacturers, speaker manufacturers and wire (maybe more because they are easier to make in theory and there are a of a lack of established "standards") but certainly there are also many that have legitimate designs and solid science behind them. To say that ALL commercial design power cords are snake oil or their makers are corrupt or ignorant is simply an unsupportable statement.

Anyone that claims all power cords are based on junk science or made by crooks are entitled to their opinion. However, they are also ignoring or discounting a massive amount of professional opinion, explainable science and anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

Regards,

Grant
Shunyata Research

Grant - Let me add that these narrow spikes have width (conduction angle) and therefore peak amplitude dependent on impedance of power transformer and ESR of capacitors (Schaffer's diagrams). Often with huge banks of capacitors in parallel (very low ESR) and big transformers peaks can be really high. It causes big voltage drops in power cords but also heats-up transformers since rms value of power (related to heat) is much higher than average value hence heating windings, while high frequency content heats-up the core. This high frequency content of the very high current spikes is also radiated by the cord. Linear power supply is in reality a switching power supply operating at 120Hz where "ON" time is proportional to load.

As for telling others what they should or shouldn't hear I'm guilty of it as well. I expressed opinion that Benchmark DAC1 is insensitive to transports and digital cables knowing that it has huge jitter suppression (2Hz jitter bandwidth) in order of >100dB at the frequencies of interest (kHz) on the top of very low amplitude of the sidebands (-60dB) created by the jitter. Many people confirmed it but also many found difference in their systems. I don't know why and cannot explain it, but it was wrong for me to say they imagined it. Perhaps something else changed - like electrical noise (FCC requires transmitters to cut power around 6PM), warming of the gear (often ferrofluid in the tweeters), ground loops or just simply I'm wrong and Benchmark is not that perfect. Now I only say that I cannot hear any difference IN MY SYSTEM.