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

I know a guy (who made my living room speakers) who has spent years perfecting his brand of power cord. Knowing, if superficially, how much time and effort he has put in the project and how many trial and error he has gone through, I can’t say he is overcharging. It is not just the cost of the material plus some labor cost.

I know a guy (who made my living room speakers) who has spent years perfecting his brand of power cord.

I am glad the power cord has no feeling :-)

There’s not much close to the confiscatory pricing of lengths of wire in this hobby except for perhaps streamers and server’s , basically computer parts in an attractive looking box.

I love these threads and if I were in the audiophile business selling lengths of proprietary designed wire would be my first choice and my 2nd would be streamers and servers at eye popping esoteric prices of course...

The guy I mentioned earlier about, for instance, uses 31 different small conductors in his brand of interconnect cables, and checks the direction of each. To come up with the 31 combo in the first place is a lot of work, then check the direction of each, most of which are not specified by the manufacturers? If one of 31 is in the wrong direction, it messes with the sound quality. He demonstrated it to me and I agreed with him. So it is not that simple, like different length, etc. And fyi, the length of power cord especially changes the sound.

@in_shore

"There’s not much close to the confiscatory pricing of lengths of wire in this hobby except for perhaps streamers and server’s , basically computer parts in an attractive looking box.

I love these threads and if I were in the audiophile business selling lengths of proprietary designed wire would be my first choice and my 2nd would be streamers and servers at eye popping esoteric prices of course..."


Yeah, that would be the easy way to do it - if we had no scruples of course.

Once upon a time Noel Lee (Monster Cables) transformed himself into an almost overnight millionaire with little more than the power of suggestion - ie thicker = better.

Naturally enough many since have sought to follow in his footsteps.

However since those days of poor DIN plugs, crudely twisted wire extensions, and the cheapest possible bell wire are over, a different approach must be found.

In this era of readily available high purity oxygen-free copper, suggestion just won’t hack it anymore. Audiophiles may be gullible but not that gullible.

And so a better weapon must be found, and it has been.

Paranoia.

In particular the widespread attempt to feed concerns over electromagnetic / radio interference (4G/5G, smartphones etc) has now become the weapon of choice to induce audiophile paranoia.

As advertisers have long known, humans are always vulnerable to paranoia.

More importantly they will pay good money to be relieved of it.

The issue of whether the most expensive cables (power, loudspeaker or interconnect, take your pick) that money can buy today actually sound any better than those from the mid-1970s is not something any cable vendor would dare to claim.

They simply dare not propagate such falsehood.

For obvious reasons.

@in_shore, on second thoughts, if you want to write the blurb I'll find a supplier or vice versa...