Is the amplifier and preamplifier plugged into the wall or is that a power strip / power conditioner behind the rack?
ABX testing with AQ Dragon power cords
I was talking to my dealer about how good the system sounds that he sold me. I mentioned that I had tried some new speaker/interconnect cables from a local amp/cable manufacturer & both I and the company boss agreed that there was little discernible sound difference between his cables & mine. He couldn’t understand why. He also told me that my room acoustics were amazing, top notch. He’d like me to bring my cables (& his) to his listening room & we’ll compare there. That’s for next week.
My dealer said that in his 40 years this has never happened & he was ready to rise to the challenge. He said he would send me a couple of AQ Hurricane power cords to try on my amp/pre and I’d be amazed. I said why bother, send some Dragons. He told me to connect them to my amp & preamp & I should be amazed within 10 seconds of comparing. Today I received a Dragon HC & Source power cord. I listened to some music I’m very familiar with through my Lumin T3 playing FLAC files from the attached USB. Then I swapped the amp & pre to the Dragons and listened to the same songs. No difference that I could tell. So I redid the test, one song at a time, switching back & forth. Still no difference.
I invited two neighbors over (separately) and asked them to look at my FLAC library & choose a song that they knew well. I played that for them with both sets of power cords. One said he couldn’t hear any difference between the two. The other said that one (mine) sounded like it had slightly more treble, the other (Dragon) sounded like more bass. I played a third version (turned out it was mine but he didn’t know) and he said that was the bass version. He was wrong & admitted that the differences were so small that he really couldn’t choose between the two.
I called my dealer & he asked if the difference was earth shattering. I told him no & he asked how that was possible when he just sent similar cables to another customer last week with a similarly priced system as mine & that guy said that the SQ improved 50% and was ecstatic. I said that that guy must have decided already that he was going to buy them and determined that for that money they must improve the sound. My dealer said that either my ears are those a near dead 95 year old or his last 40 years experience have been a sham. I suggested that he was selling & demoing a product to people that had a propensity to believe it worked & therefore it worked for them. I offered to have him drive here (4 hour drive) and listen for himself & I’ll swap cables while his mind is blown. We may get there yet.
I hesitate to post a photo of my listening room as experience tells me that those that are strong proponents of cables will pick it apart and blame a myriad of other crap rather than recognizing that the 3 of us heard no difference on a high resolving system situated in a room would good acoustics... but here goes.
McIntosh MC462/C2700, Pure Fidelity Harmony TT, Gold Note PH-10/PSU-10 phono stage, Lumin T3/Sbooster, Sonus Faber Amati G5 speakers, Sonus Faber Gravis V sub.
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One aspect that is highly significant, it also matters how the power is done internally to the component you're using. With a conventional unregulated linear PSU in say, a typical power amp for example you can generally hear effects of fuses, power cords readily IME. But we can make a linear PSU where you can't hear much of those upstream items at all. Just for example, if you filter and regulate downstream. It does matter (a lot) IME. Another example, I have a super shunt attenuator buffered preamp design that employs 2 stages of very high performance linear regulation. One would likely be enough but hey, it has 2 because that's how I wanted it :D And the fact is you'll be very hard pressed to hear anything happening upstream (power cord, fuse). In theory and in real experience. You can't hear much of a DC flat line basically, no matter how much wishful thinking is also applied lol.. In my friend's super system he's done a lot of power chord research. He also has AQ Dragons (the full loom in in fact). As I was advising him, we basically couldn't hear any power cord effects using said preamp and a power amp design I brought. So I'm just trying to say, IME not all systems are as sensitive as others to power cords and fuses. JME YMMV. TEK
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@donavabdear Wrote:
I agree! In my opinion, addressing the AC mains power coming in the home and the wiring in-wall is more important. All-wiring and grounding from the electrical pole to the audio equipment matters. 😎 See article here! Mike |
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