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Why Power Cables Affect Sound

I just bought a new CD player and was underwhelmed with it compared to my cheaper, lower quality CD player. That’s when it hit me that my cheaper CD player is using an upgraded power cable. When I put an upgraded power cable on my new CD player, the sound was instantly transformed: the treble was tamed, the music was more dynamic and lifelike, and overall more musical. 

This got me thinking as to how in the world a power cable can affect sound. I want to hear all of your ideas. Here’s one of my ideas:

I have heard from many sources that a good power cable is made of multiple gauge conductors from large gauge to small gauge. The electrons in a power cable are like a train with each electron acting as a train car. When a treble note is played, for example, the small gauge wires can react quickly because that “train” has much less mass than a large gauge conductor. If you only had one large gauge conductor, you would need to accelerate a very large train for a small, quick treble note, and this leads to poor dynamics. A similar analogy might be water in a pipe. A small pipe can react much quicker to higher frequencies than a large pipe due to the decreased mass/momentum of the water in the pipe. 

That’s one of my ideas. Now I want to hear your thoughts and have a general discussion of why power cables matter. 

If you don’t think power cables matter at all, please refrain from derailing the conversation with antagonism. There a time and place for that but not in this thread please. 
mkgus
jafreeman's avatar
jafreeman
693 posts
 
"If one were to grant that a PC can change the resulting sound of a system.... one has to posit that there is intrinsically “something” we are essentially conditioning or altering coming in from the wall current." xyobgyn

Yes, that "something" IS the electrical current that courses through your system and wires and into your speakers. Upon that current resides the audio signal you like to hear. If the current is kept free of noise and distortion, you hear more of the signal. An EE may say the current has been filtered through many phases of circuit and the AC cord does not matter. Empirically, those of us who are not EE’s are experiencing that high-quality AC cords, interconnects, speaker wires and fundamentally-important isolation transformers are bringing sound quality to much higher levels of enjoyment. At the expense of sounding naive, I have concluded that there must be a burden of distortion that must be shared by the audio signal all the way through the system. Otherwise, an AC cord would not matter, but it does.
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xyobgyn's avatar
xyobgyn
42 posts
 
I’m not mistaken, here is your quote:

IMPORTANT: Use the best available speaker wires and interconnects. Audio Research cannot emphasize this enough. As better components and systems are developed, it becomes increasingly important to avoid the limitations of inferior system interconnections. 

I trust you’ve copied what ARC has in their insert correctly. I believe it’s a valuable contribution to a discussion about what ARC believes the end user should consider for speaker wires and interconnects. But it doesn’t seem to apply to this thread.

It is your quote, not mine.

I am surprised no one else picked up on this.  An interesting poll would be to see if any companies include on paper, in their user instructions, opinions that one should invest in the best possible or best matching PC to go with their amp, preamp, DAC, Turntable or whatever? 

I know it doesn’t settle the question posed my the OP, “How do PC change the sound?


jafreeman's avatar
jafreeman
693 posts
 
Yes, xyobgyn, and then I asked that you read my subsequent posts on what ARC is doing with aftermarket AC cords in their factory listening room!  ARC completes that quote about interconnections with real-world use of AC cords to voice their designs.  Please do not try to edit the comprehensive evidence I have offered.  
xyobgyn's avatar
xyobgyn
42 posts
 
Jafreeman,

It it seems you, as well as others, are basically saying that the OEM isn’t sending their units out with adequate sound conditioners or AC line cleaners to cover noisy AC power lines. 

The yay-sayers are essentially using these PC to clean up the AC line noise. 

This is indeed a reasonable hypothesis to explain why some people can change the sound of their equipment with a PC change. 

It is virtually impossible for the OEM to test for all possible noise on an AC line. And yet, it’s very dissapointing to think that they don’t know how to build a great power supply to perform that task at the levels most of us invest in our equipment. But it does make sense in that context. 

Probably makes sense then, if you buy into “OEM shipping with poor resistance to line noise”, to use the supplied PC, and get a kick-butt power conditioner.... plug everything into that.

if you’re using a great conditioner, I’m at loss to explain or understand how a decent PC can be bested, other than it’s not an adequate conditioner.




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