Power cord upgrade

Just watch this and learn something

instantaneous current draw

I like to learn, so I watched.

Besides the fact that wire gauge is never mentioned in the video, I was surprised that that crappy PC power cord had a measured .5kA transient current delivery capability. That's 500A, which should cover pretty much any audio-related use case many times over.

Why did Shunyata choose to highlight such a useless metric rather than real-world ones like resistance and temperature increase and voltage drop under sustained high-current use? Unless I'm missing something, it's almost as if they're going out of their way to give critics more ammunition by creating the impression that a crappy PC power cord is more than capable of doing the job, even though we know that overall it is not.

@zuesman I have seen you write this a few times in various threads.

I can buy 24ga OCC wire for $2.20 CDN per metre. Given one needs 20 strands of this to make a 10ga power cable, the wire would cost me $44 per metre or $88 CDN for a 2m power cable. Given that a company the size of Transparent or Shunyata could buy large quantities of this and get it for a much better price than I, and subtracting the cost of their "cheap" OFHC or OFE C1010, could we assume it would cost them a maximum of about $50 more per power cable? For a $3000 power cable this is negligible. Common sense tells me if it made a difference they would use it. 

I understand if someone wants to sell cables and doesn't have an excellent decades long reputation of selling exceptional sounding cables, they will turn to marketing to and throw numbers, figures and terms in order to sell it. If someone thinks they can buy a 7N OCC cable for $50 and believes everybody else who pays more for their cable is getting ripped off they are fools. I am sure there are those who bought a cable such as this one and thought it sounded great because they believed it was 7N OCC copper and that is the only part that matters- the mind is a powerful thing.

Who is able to actually confirm the purity of the copper, anyway? Do we trust the seller/supplier? I see dozens of resellers of 7N copper wire, who audits them? 

Or if this 7N copper exists, should we care? is this the same as the amplifier that has 0.001% distortion sounds 100 times better than the one that has 0.1% distortion? 

This article is 10 years old now: Roger Skoff on copper purity

mclinnguy,

And I'll keep writing how much better OCC single crystal is than OFC obviously you haven't done much research Let me educate you OFC wire has minimum 500 crystal barriers per foot that's little fractures in the wire that the signal has to jump across which causes all kinds of bad things like coldness hardness brightness edginess any one of those things or all of those things and when a company like transparent has the audacity to charge $70,000 for the cheapest crappy wire on the market that pisses me off, I don't like seeing people get ripped off by scam companies like that, OCC single crystal wire has been proven to be the best wire for audio for about 60 years now and the rectangular OCC single crystal wire is even better than the round OCC single crystal wire, but if some people like to get ripped off that's totally up to them I guess, and I even phoned Transparent and asked them why they're not using single crystal instead of cheap OFC wire and you know what the answer was to me which was full of crap? we tested all kinds of wire and we found OFC the best, well it's the cheapest so they can make more profit and just so you know your prices are way off 14 gauge Teflon coated stranded OCC is$9.50 a foot in Canada right now not much less than the US so it is definitely not cheap, but I've done the comparison myself I rewired my monitor audio gold G4 speakers with single crystal and I got a 15 to 20% improvement right across the board and now that I have the platinum 200 ll I'll be doing the same thing and replacing the silver plated OFC that's in there right now.

mclinnguy,

There's no such purity as 7N copper, the best purity for OCC single crystal copper is 6N, I think you're getting confused with the OCC silver that's 7N.

@devinplombier 

That's 500A, which should cover pretty much any audio-related use case many times over.

Does it though? I found it surprising also, it is a 20 amp circuit and he is pulling 1000 amps out of it. Apparently audio is not a hair dryer or a toaster- it is not about continuous rather instantaneous current delivery, or in Shunyata's slogan DTCD. But this is perhaps why when one connects an excellent audio cable one often hears more loudness and better dynamics.