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

In that case, technical or scientific data could be fully employed to guide purchasing decisions - rather than vague claims by the cable manufacturers to justify their outrageous prices
+2

Maybe get NASA or DARPA, MIT, even AES to vouch for some cable or power cord. 🥱

@geoffkait
Lol Man, your off the chain! 

The problem with most cable claims, at least from the MFR claims is that they always work. 


The argument w.r.t. the 50 feet of ROMEX before the plug sounds good and for some aspects of performance is valid. What it does not address is differential voltages between equipment locally, usually most influenced by grounds, though ground line interaction is possible. Do you need $20K of power cords to solve this? No, $100 of copper strapping between equipment grounds will do far more.  There is the potential for power cord to interconnect EMI, but again you don't need a super expensive cord to fix.


W.r.t. speaker cables, inductance and capacitance can make some differences at high frequencies but so can humidity and likely larger effects unless you are running electrostatics in which case it would be significant. Gauge and inductance can make differences in response of 1/10s of a db depending on cable and speaker and varied with the speaker impedance.  Audible ... Highly questionable and again, doesn't take $10k.  And again, the claim that This cable will make all systems sound better is unlikely to be factual at all as results are highly system dependent.


Last, for all the magic claims, there really is no magic. Resistance, inductance and capacitance will be dominant, skin resistance can be ruled out quickly with stranded wire, transmission line effects only play when you have a very wide bandwidth unstable amplifier, and dielectric absorption is easily measured and quantified. Talks of silver, copper, cryo, geometry, etc. are just marketing to impress those that do not understand how meaningless that is, and that if those things really made a difference it would be easily measured.


If you do a search on a technical claim and it Only shows up hits related to audiophiles you know it is probably bull.  Industries where performance means money or the difference between working or not (many scientific endeavours), and employ people who can track down sources of error, don't worry about these things. 


One caveat is much expectation is that a product is designed competently. I can be confident my Rohde and Schwartz spectrum analyzer was likely designed properly or at least as performance parameters were properly verified. Boutique audio gear not so much. Many use linear power supply topologies that were state of the art 50 years ago.



Summary: I know pretty well how cables could impact results, don't believe most impacts are actually audible, know that some things that should not be audible are due to poor design, and know that no cable component can be universally better.

What so-called magic claims by cable or power cord manufacturers are you referring to? I suspect you are making this up just so you can go off on one of your pseudo-scientist rampages, atdavid, Ethan or whoever.

https://youtu.be/VEaLpslkwDE