All: Sorry to go off like this, but if you hadn't noticed, I haven't been posting to any new threads for what seems like two or three months now. So the audio pedant in me is a little on the bottled-up side. I have occasionally posted to threads I was already on, and this thread is a continuation of one of those.
Max and Stehno: The relevant part you couldn't stay awake to make it to at the end, which I'll repeat here is: If I like my new outlet's sound, I'll attribute that to the comparitively poor condition of my old one, not to the cryo treatment. This is the only honest and sensible position I'll be able to take absent a rigorous experiment which I'm not interested enough to bother doing. (But if I was to do that experiment, I expect my observations would be along the lines of Eldartford's.)
Hdm: I do believe shielding could be one of the primary factors in explaining the performance gains of aftermarket power cords, but not the only one. I think a big part of the equation resides in the fact that most aftermarket cords also offer heavier-guage conductors than do stock cords. If you compare the guages of both the in-wall and outside-the-house wiring to that of your typical stock cord, a case can be made for the last five feet's being the weakest link due solely to its lighter guage, never mind shielding. In this regard, I don't see upgrade power cords as necessarily being so genius in their execution, as much as I see the stock cords being not fully adequate for their task. The remainder of the improvements (or just differences) we hear with aftermarket power cords vs. stock cords, or the sonic differences between various upgrade models, I think would mostly lie in other areas like filtration effects, capacitance and inductance, and resonant tuning. So shielding doesn't have to be the whole ball of wax.
About the resistance-lowering issue: your assurances do not counter my argument that even if the resistance of a stock outlet can be halved through cryo treatment (you do not quantify the imrovement, so I don't know if this is in the ballpark, too low, or way optimistic, though I suspect the latter), that will make almost no global difference in the total resistance presented by the powerline to the components' power supplies. Since power cords represent a greater portion of the powerline signal path, and since even aftermarket ones are usually lighter in guage than the conductors out on the utility pole, I do not offer this argument against cryo'ing of power cords.
All again: I'm not trying to tell anyone not to cryo their outlets, not to use or buy cryo'ed outlets, or that they're crazy for enjoying them if they do. And though Max thinks I'm too uptight about the subject, I really and truly don't actually give a shit about any of this - which doesn't mean that I can't get off on thinking about the subject critically, and writing about it. I think Hdm among others understands this much about me: as long as we enjoy listening to our music, however we do it, the rest of all this hoo ha is simply for the added enjoyment of having a good, reasoned debate.
I think I've laid out a pretty good case that there is no plausible reason which can be put forth why anyone would reliably hear significant improvements by cryo-treating a new-condition outlet other than psychological ones, although obviously such psychology won't work for me personally. (And I'm perfectly willing to accept the equally-obvious corollary to that proposition, that my own psychology regarding this issue could prevent me from hearing a legitimate improvement if there was one.) My arguments are not against the efficacy of cryo in general, a topic about which I know very little, but against the likelihood that even if cryo is as effective as advertised, it still should make virtually no difference in this particular application.
I will be very interested if anyone can offer counter-arguments showing ways I might be proven incorrect in theory - in other words, describe a cogent technical argument showing why the alleged improvements resulting from cryo-treating otherwise-new condition AC outlets should be both probable and audible. I may be missing something important here, but please tell me not just the 'what' you're convinced you've observed, but the 'how' and maybe the 'why' of it that makes your observations not only possible but logical. I know you have your anecdotal arguments; you've already offered them (as well as arguments about why Eldartford's tests may not be valid). I find those arguments to be of debatable validity themselves, but that's not my point. What I'm looking for are good supporting hypothetical explanations of why I shouldn't ascribe your anecdotally positive results as being due to psychology as the only possible cause. Either that, or just admit that psychology could be it, and you don't care (as well you shouldn't, provided you're able to be honest with yourself about it), or at least admit you have no idea how cryo could audibly improve the sound of an outlet but you're still convinced it does (a position also known as the 'Mpingo defense').
Of course, failing all that, you could also just tell me to shut up and go to hell...Happy listening, Z. :-)
