The Truth About Power Cords and there "Real" Price to Performance


This is a journey through real life experiences from you to everyone that cares to educate themselves. I must admit that I was not a believer in power cords and how they affect sound in your system. I from the camp that believed that the speaker provided 75% of the sound signature then your source then components but never the power cord. Until that magic day I along with another highly acclaimed AudioGoner who I will keep anatomist ran through a few cables in quite a few different systems and was "WOWED" at what I heard. That being said cable I know that I am not the only believer and that is why there are so many power cord/cable companies out there that range from $50 to 20-30 thousand dollars and above. So I like most of you have to scratch my head and ask where do I begin what brand and product and what should i really pay for it?

The purpose of this discussion to get some honest feed back on Price to Performance from you the end user to us here in the community.

Please fire away!


 


128x128blumartini
This is all simply an indication of the big split that exists between HiFi folks and Advanced Audiophiles. Nothing to get hung up about, though. 🤗

The closer you look the weirder it gets. - Old audiophile axiom

“In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.[1]” - Richard Feynman

Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life, and gave examples from advertising, politics, and psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science. 

I posted this on another thread, on another forum. It’s not perfectly accurate but accurate enough for folks to get the gist of what is going on re hearing vs measurements:

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It’s not that we hear out to 20khz, it is the 17,500-23,500 cilia in the ear, and how they move in a complex inter related 3-D dance of motion, over time, how each responds with the firing of a neuron, over time.
Imagine that many click channels, where each motion of any kind, causes a click in each, and then each click is inter-related to the other clicks, individually and cumulatively. And then analyzed as a record, over time and decoded over time, in the minutia, by the neural components that are tied to the hearing mechanism. What I mean is that they are physically related in motion, and thus interrelated physically, in the generation of a ’click’ (neural signal firing)

So the inter-relations, easily get into the complex microsecond level flowing relations. They are all time related (firing order, and cycling) to one another in the neural analysis, in the absolute sense. There is a fluid in there, in a sac, one might say and we get traveling waves in it and in the sac surface, and the cilia are activated according to the flow patterns on what you might think of as a balloon, with the cilia inside it. So, yes, 3d flow patterns in a fluid sac, over time, with hairs throughout it, like a set of hair/fibers. Neurally connected hairs. About 20k of them. The number of ways that a signal can be created via a physical distortion impinging upon that .....is stupidly high. Crazy high. Incalculably high.

It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with sine wave signals from a signal generator, or what not. That idea is a thousand fold, a million fold joke... compared to the power and fine signal generation within and subsequent analysis capacity of the human ear.

We don’t have any hardware available to us that can come close to that level of auditory or electrical signal fine analysis.

Then we get to the question of physical ability through individual physical build. That we are all different than one another and this hearing function follows the same path as IQ differentials across a set of individuals. Some extreme ear capacities vs ..uhm..not so good hearing capacities.

we can lose the ability to hear out to 20khz, but retain the ability to hear microsecond timing differentials in complex waveforms, as that is the basic function of the ear design that is there, if there is any decent hearing function quality left at all (aged ears). Then, we’ve got TWO of them, also inter-related. The ear is an extreme machine, undoubtedly so.

Essentially, there is no delusion. None.

You hear what you hear and the hardware utilized to try and analyze that, is woefully deficient, as is the current engineering mindset involved in the measuring.

One can argue the validity and usefulness of what is heard. But that the ear is superior to the mindset of measuring, at this time? This is not even remotely debatable, for an educated (on this subject) mind.
Holy Guacamole! No sooner do I mention Cargo Cultists one of them shows up! Wow! Was that a coinkidink or what? Deprogrammers are standing by. You have to love it when someone says something is “not even remotely debatable for an educated mind.” Isn’t that some sort of tip-off?
You are trying to take complex things that happen in 3 dimensional sound field that is time variant and apply that to an simple electrical signal with absolutely no proof of the claims you effectively make about said electrical signal


A two channel initially mechanical system, i.e. the ear, with a 20khz bandwidth, if you are lucky, can detect microsecond timing differentials ... Just like two microphones with a 20khz bandwidth digitized at 44.1Khz can resolve microsecond time of arrival differences. This is very well understood and done day in and day out with all manner of signals.  There is no magic, there is no unknown branch of physics not yet understood, and even if we don’t understand all the neural pathways that does not change the fact that our hearing starts as a mechanical system that has not been shown to extend in bandwidth past 20Khz. Even experiments that indicated potential detection of ultrasonics were not able to show ultimately that it was not subharmonic resonances that were detected.


Your statement about us not having the hardware for electrical fine signal analysis required for human acoustic testing is simply not supportable. That claim is based on misunderstandings and knowledge gaps such as the belief that 44.1Khz (or 192Khz) digitization cannot carry within subsample, microsecond timing information. It can, within the bandwidth of the hearing system. Couple a flawed understanding of digitized and reconstructed analog signals and the information they carry and the potential for a bandwidth limited system to provide detection capability much faster than that bandwidth and you get the statements below which are not based in facts nor supportable with anything passing for evidence.


We don’t have any hardware available to us that can come close to that level of auditory or electrical signal fine analysis.