How does length affect power cable sound quality?

5 or 6 feet is optimum longer than 10 feet is not great.

 

Well, there are plenty of seconds in a minute. and sixty of those in an hour. With an average of 16 hours available a day. Being retired that is 365 days a year. And I have been playing around with power cords at least since 1998.. Twenty years, (that includes at least 4 leap days) times 365 days times 16 hours a day... etc means I have had 420,710,400 seconds of time available, and somewhere in there I spent a few of them moving around powercords. I am positive have spent far more time wiping my behind than moving powercords around. But less time doing that than posting around here and other audio sites, since here alone I have managed to whittle away at nearly 6,000 meanderings. You on the other hand, with 95 posts, have certainly been wiping you behind way more than posting... .

Thanks Elizabeth for introducing me to your life. I am very fast at wiping my butt, I built a machine to do that. A jet of water and a washcloth saves a lot ot TP. Water is a more powerfull tool.

I spend most of my time designing and building amplifiers because they are a powerful tool. I make ESL speakers too and drive them directly with 5,000 volt amplifiers that produce 2,500 VA of power. You really can't drive ESLs with much less if you like Miles Davis loud. The Beveridge and Acoustat DD amps were in that range also.  When one is experimenting with ESLs a DIrect Drive amplifier is a very powerful tool as it elimintes the nasty step-up transformer interaction. In the process I found that half the drive power often goes into the transformer at high frequencies due to winding capacitance which is often as large as the capacitance of the paknel.

I quoted you because I am hoping by my little jab that you and others might be interested in learning more about the tools that others are using. You might be interested in my school.http://www.berkeleyhifischool.com/.
Here people can wind their own transformers, build amplifiers of any kind, We keep a few Furtech plugs around for those who like to piddle with such. We also teach people how to put diodes in the plugs to block small DC on the line. Have you tried that?

On the first page there is a link to a talk I gave recently called "Having fun at Burning Amp" where Nelson Pass and I spoke to over 100 hungry audiophiles. What's different about attendees at this annual event is that they want to get deeper into the equipment. Several dozen people took the time and trouble to bring their creations and play them for us in the demo rooms.

The few people there who like powercords make their own. The rest dont really care as there are more interesting things to do like Nelson's amp camp where you actually make an amplifier you can take home and listen to. Wow, what a concept, make a amplifier from a well respected designer like Nelson. He's not waisting his time on power cords.

I have a good freind who buys premium power cords because he likes the way they look. If they make a difference fine, if they dont fine. They are just a pretty thing.

Im on here in the hopes of educating and making suggestions to what people might do to make big improvements in their Hi Fi. I would love to see people direcitly connect ampifiers to the drivers in their speakers, disconnect the crossover, get a line level crossover, choose appropriate amps for each driver. Perhaps some big SS amp for the woofer and some smaller Tube amp for the tweeters. Once you have done that one can turn a knob and have a little more or a lttle less woofer, without having to invoke tone controls. Now we are talking about a big hammer.

Thanks for your response.

Or perhaps a tube amp for everything. Whoa! Did I just say that?! 

Wow, discussions here can get nasty in a hurry...
Roger, I must say you asked for it...

I stuck my neck out but it didn't get cut off yet. I wanted to correspond with people who are really into it and I found one.

Or perhaps a tube amp for everything. Whoa! Did I just say that?!

Of course tubes are great for many applications. When I was a child I built transistor amplifiers, but now as a man I must give up those childish ways. :) 

The first thing that struck me about transistors is how fragile and unforgiving they were and still are. Protecting them is difficult and many protection circuits cause premature clipping into reactive loads like ESLs. 

Tubes need no such protectors. RCA advertised a sweep tube that could take a 400% overload for several seconds. No transistor can do that. 

The output transformer has become a particular curiosity of mine and making them better and better has been a long and exciting journey. I also went down the road of making an OTL with a built in Autoformer. It has many interesting characteristics, one of them being power bandwidth out past 100Khz and very high damping, Futterman style.

I have no fear of high voltage or the quips of those who know little about how amplifiers work.