Effects Of Power Cords On Electrostatic Speakers

@ricevs   Thank you for insulting me.  Of course I listen.

Listen, not imagine.

I wholeheartedly agree with audioman58, noodlyarm, bellemusique and quite a few others on these points: 1) while there are exceptions (and they are usually at the highest price points, because they have the profit-margin to do it), certainly for commercial speakers (and quite often audio equipment in general), the innards -- capacitors, resistors, wire, etc. -- is very often below par to achieve a cost/price point target. Major gains are possible by upgrading these. 2) cables -- power, speaker wire, interconnects do matter -- the degree can vary, and 3) you can indeed hear real differences. It is not expectation bias, at least in my experience. On average, I critically listen to music probably ~15-20 hrs/week on average, all genres (I do like to do other things, too), have done a lot of A/B testing (on a rare occasion or three even had friends make the changes while I left the room) and you can hear differences. My experience. If your mileage varies, so be it. Live and let live.

An always gratifying maintenance tweak for power cables - spray their blades once in awhile with Deoxit. On my Anticables all copper power cables this is mandatory for sound quality.

@hsbrock

Glad I could say something helpful.

Let me add some detail. The time I had to go out and find warmer cable was when I had AMT and ribbon speakers. They were too, well let’s say, too good, in the upper frequencies. They reproduced the deficiencies in high frequencies of my components really well, producing a very fatiguing and unpleasant experience. I would not worry about loosing that “transparency”. This is why cables and interconnects need to be chosen last. You need your final system…. With all your components that sound absolutely spectacular. Then, you start looking for wire.

I spent well over thirty years with planar speakers (electrostatic, AMT, and ribbon). The magic comes from great midrange and really great high frequency response… the same thing that super tweeters do. It is the harmonics above what you can hear that affects what you can hear. This can be magical, if not quite real. I gave up on them and went to traditional dynamic speakers. I am not suggesting you do this. But, don’t worry about losing the transparency. Get your components perfect… then go looking for wire.

@ghdprentice  What you wrote about Planars above and returning to more traditional drivers is most interesting to me because I was about to make the investment this very evening in about 18-36 planars at, what would be for me, a very substantial investment. (I had planed on building a stereo system for each of our children.) I have heard almost uniform praise of the transparency of planars, the lower distortion, the flatness of response, the tightness of transients. Now your comment has baffled me because you obviously have much audio experience, esp. with AMT planars. Could you please advise us further or share more detail?