I thought you would say something like that about why your faith is still strong. Yes, it's only what you hear that matters to you, but maybe it's time to dial-back on the hearty recommendations for others or at least qualify them somewhat, and to take a second look at the conditions under which other adopters reported their observations of positive improvements. Stehno was one of those converted adopters before he added an element of objectivity to his testing, but I'm not sure what he's certain of today. Sometimes it does seem that the more ephemeral or debatable an 'improvement' in high end audio is, the more vociferous a group of audiophiles forms to support it. It's almost as if more concrete improvements would just be too boring and easily percieved by anyone with ears to seem exciting. (Or maybe it's just that concrete improvements are too hard to come by anymore in this hobby, so fetishizing minutiae blown-up to larger-than-life proportions is how we compensate.) Certainly Maxgain isn't the only audiophile to feel some degree of contempt for what he sees as overly-rigorous auditioning checks and balances ; I think there could be some attractive element of what we might call 'audio machismo' at work in seeming able to confidently proclaim one's sonic impressions, without injecting doubt or qualifiers, based on very subjective auditioning experience.
[This is a prefered mode of audio salesmen BTW - just the other day I was in a showroom where a guy was trying to audition two speakers against each other ; the salesman came in and asked which one he liked best. The customer said he liked elements of each and wasn't sure, but was leaning toward the one with the fuller bass. The salesman replied that it was obvious to him, one of the speakers sounded 'clearer' than the other, so that was it. I didn't say anything, but what was 'obvious' to me was that the one speaker he was trying to sell, a high-order stand-mount 2-way, 'clearly' sounded like a woofer and a tweeter working separately, whereas the one the customer seemed to prefer unmolested, a first-order floor-standing 3-way (I know, why compare these two?), sounded more coherent and yes, fuller in the bass, so of course the other speaker thrust more 'detail' at you more and could be said to sound 'clearer' even if it didn't sound as natural to me. The certainty tactic seemed to be working ; after the customer registered a meek protest, I decided I had to leave the room when he began letting his preference be swayed by the salesman's greater apparent confidence. I'll mention that the only reason I went into this shop, which I generally avoid even though I can walk to it from my house, was to meet with an Audiogoner who was buying a cable from me. That's karma for the bricks-and-mortar store for ya! But I did go home having purchased a $42 tweak...]
I've learned I can't always care so much what others say they hear. It's not a matter of trust ; I trust Albert Porter implicitly both to be entirely forthcoming and to assess sonic qualities (his appraisal of the tubes he sent me to try out jibed pretty much exactly with what I heard). But I told him when I bought the Porter Port that I didn't sign on to the cryo'd-outlet bandwagon in theory - to me, it's more likely there were other reasons in play if he heard an improvement. I trusted Stehno's hearing and opinions enough to take up his recommendation on auditioning a speaker cable (through purchasing it, I might add) which is now my reference. Also Psychicanimal, we've confirmed many of the same basic findings tweaking our 1200's with the KAB stuff, but I've told him flat-out I can't accept it when he says his audio-buddies can hear those same improvements when he plays his system for them *over the telephone*. Again, I think other reasons for such an impression are much more likely. (BTW, I don't personally find it beyond imagining that there might be some audible differences among various models of outlets, mostly because I'm willing to believe some variation in connection integrity could exist, maybe as well as conductor robustness, that could affect current capacity under high demand.)
Anyway, about the reason you give that cryo could lower an outlet's resistance: I addressed this above, but I'll do it again in more focused detail here (and in case you couldn't read my post that far :-)
Let's ignore all the wiring from the power station to the utility pole transformer and from the pole to the house. Let's just talk about the wiring from the breaker panel to the outlet. Let's assume this wiring has some resistance per foot we'll call X, and is 30ft. long yielding a total resistance of 30X. Let's also assume that the conductors inside our outlet have that same resistance X per foot, or X/12 for the one inch of conductor we'll say is in there. Ignoring the final five feet represented by the AC powercord and everything before the breaker box, our components are seeing a total resistance presented to their power supplies of 30X + X/12.
Now, let's assume that if we cryo the outlet, its resistance drops from 1/12X to zero, becoming a perfect superconductor for that one inch of powerline pathway (obviously an impossibility, so this is better than a best-case scenario in real life). This means the total powerline resistance under our definition is now just 30X. This is about the same thing as if we had simply shortened our 30ft. in-wall wiring run by one inch, or a reduction of 1/360 or under .3% of the total powerline resistance seen by the components' power supplies (and remember, this is for a totally non-resistive outlet, much better than I suspect can actually be achieved by cryo in real life). The outlet's connection integrity has stayed the same. Again, I ask: why should we think this trivially minor drop in the powerline resistance will cause such an effect on our components' power supplies' performance as to be clearly audible at the speakers? I think a better explanation is needed - or more likely that one doesn't exist (well, it does exist, but it doesn't have anything to do with the metal inside outlets, it has to do with the gray matter inside heads). But heaven knows I'm no electrical engineer, so if something is fundamentally amiss with my reasoning about this resistance argument, please somebody set me straight.
BTW, I'm curious to read further thoughts from both Eldartford and Stehno at some point here...
