Chad, it was inevitable that you make this decision. Now you face the nearly countless alternatives. Few of us have heard more than a handful of what is available. Friends with good ears are your best recourse. Or if you have a true audiophile dealer nearby give what he sells a listen. View it as a quest not as a task.
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i write as a person who really wishes that there were better, more credible, information available about audio equipment. but the amount of bs that is so frequently proliferated about in the public, hurts the credibility of the industry in general. i appreciate the existence of scientific methods of empirical observation. but that's not what is going on here. here, the problems are that you often have suggestion and anticipation *before* observation. that kind of stuff can color your observations. that doesn't "prove" that the obsrevations are incorrect; but it does make them highly suspect. if you read my comments more closely, you will note that i stated that AT MINIMUM, such "evaluations" need to be done in blind testing, where the listener does not know which components are being used, or even whether components have been changed at all from one test to the next. i guarantee you that you would be a lot less sure about the purported "sonic improvements" that you claim to hear if you didn't know what you were listening to from one test to the next.
i don't know what your test methods were, but if you went into it with the intention of "proving" that power cables did make a difference, i suspect that you tended to set up the test to bias toward the result that you were seeking to get. in general, this kind of testing is highly unreliable: i'll listen to one component, and then while repeating the test, and even when playing the same piece of music, i have to try to remember exactly how it sounded a few minutes earlier. it is an, at best, unreliable means of testing, and one in which the bias is to think that the most recent hearing is the best one. so if, in your testing, you used the "upgraded" power cord last, then i would suspect that you biased the results. that is why you have to do repeated blind testing in random sequence (including tests where you don't make any changes).
i don't doubt that the makers of audio gear are knowledgeable about electronics. but i also know that these are people who are out to make a buck by selling their wares to people who largely *don't* know a lot about electronics. let me give you an example - siltech makes high end cables, i mean, these guys make speaker cables that cost over $30,000. when i read what they had to say about their products, there were comments about how they designed their cables to over come the effects of signal distortion that can occur as a signal travels through cable. what the guy was invoking was a transmission line model of a cable. technically, that is correct, a cable can indeed be modelled as equivalent to a series of capacitors and inductors in a transmission line model. the problem is that the transmission line model is typically only relevant at microwave frequencies; to invoke such a model for signals in the range of audio frequencies is ridiculous. so basically, these guys are trying to convince you to spend thousands of dollars on cable that you can get at radio shack for $0.40/foot. that said, the siltech cables (connectors, sheaths and all) look a lot more impressive than the stuff at radio shack. |
I think anyone interested should read this: http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm#house |
too much analysis leads to paralysis. the placebo effect is alive and well. what difference does it make if powercords make a difference in sound or they don't make any difference in sound. there is no way to prove, using analytic a priori deductive methods. so any empirical proof would be based upon statistics or induction. it has been suggested that a blind test be used to test for differences in the "sound" of power cords. blind tests do not prove anything. any statement based upon perception is essentially probabilistic, hence does not prove anything. all of the efforts to justify that power cords differ in their affect upon a stereo system amount to a philosophical discussion, with no conclusion. the senses are unreliable. the only way to deal with this issue is a mathematical proof. |
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