High cost Speaker wire, interconnectors and upgraded power cords?

[Eaulive]

If I spent $1500 on a pair of interconnects, I'd better make my friends believe they indeed sound better than $5.00 RCAs. Otherwise, I'd look like a fool.

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue28/stereovox.htm

What I always liked is the highly technical arguments they employ after their listening tests

Superb definition and imaging are its strong suits. However, as a bonus, there is a sweetness and charm in and around the notes, which compels music to be even more realistic and suave. I hear this on some [but not all] of the over $2000 interconnects; this rightness on the overtones of musical notes is compelling. Add the textural integrity of the 600-SEIii to its superb imaging and excellent definition, and you have a solid winner at this price point and more.

[Lee in Montreal]

If you read most if not all the interconnects reviews, you'll notice that no quantification is ever used. Therefore the promise cannot be counter argued. But you got a lot of perceptive jumbo mambo. Nobody will be able to sue the cable manufacturer for not having been able to supply what was sold.

On another note, I know a few guys who make and sell those "higher grades" interconnects. The rule is simple. It must cost 1 percent of what it retails for. Therefore, in your $100.00 cable, you have $1.00 of material and manufacturing. I am guilty of having a few Wizard and Audioquest interconnects. All they do is filter the signal. If your tweeters are soft, get silver cables, it'll make the sound brighter. Not necessarely better though. Pure rubbish but people are buying it.

[Rolf]

To those who are more learned than me, but his is my experiance: I can tell you that I have NEVER upgraded ANY product ever if I could not hear something that at least sounded more pleassent in my ears than my existing product. For years ago we had "The Great Cable Debate, and won't go into that again. This is what I have found out: Standard interconnects, witch I don't call cables is no good. I have a relativ expencive cable from my CD Player to the pre amp. (about US$ 2000) From the pre -amp to the electronic crossover > the Power amps, not so expensive. (about US$ 800x2 as I bi-amp) From the amps to the speakers (about US$ 300x2 as I bi-amp. The speaker cables is rather thick. Why? Compare a garden hose to the ones used by the fire department. You can't get as much water out of a garden hose than the ones the fire department use. I have tried expencive power cords and compared them with a (good) standard cord. Did not hear any difference.

My advice is to try and compare. If you can't here an improvement, why change?

[BMWCCA]

The speaker cables is rather thick. Why? Compare a garden hose to the ones used by the fire department. You can't get as much water out of a garden hose than the ones the fire department use.

To push your analogy further: What will happen if you hook your fire-department hose to your domestic faucet? A rather pathetic dribble of water, is what. Same amount of water comes out, just no pressure. Sometimes those smaller "hoses" work better for what you're trying to achieve (washing your car?).

But what the heck do I know? (not much) I'm using 6-Moons White Lightning speaker cables.

[tjnif]

While people claim to hear differences, it still boggles my mind on the power cords. House is wired with say 12/2 Romex to the outlet, then you put a $$$ power cord between the outlet in the wall and the plug on the rear of the amp, but you pull the cover on the amp and it's just plain old 12ga copper from the plug to the circuitry in the amp. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how this particular 3ft piece in the entire chain could make such a difference.

I say let people buy what they like, but I'm awfully skeptical on this part.

Well, I was a big sceptic myself. As an analogy, look at the guitar cable Hendrix used and power cords of the day....pretty amazing guitar sounds from all our hero's from the 60's and 70's, why not Hi-fi, right? One of the BIGGEST improvements i heard in my system is when i used Kubala emotion power cables (on loan from audioclassics) w/ my amps ( Mcintosh MC 2000's and Mc 352's). Now mind you it was goin from the "factory' issued generic cable to "state of the art", but the difference was substantial! I went back and forth for a few days and had friends listen as well...HAD to have them!! Now perhaps a less expensive cable would of been the same...., don't know, didnt go that route.... You really need to listen and compare with your own system, mine was no contest....

[Allanvh5150]

Having said all this about cable, the same thing springs to mind about speakers. D66000 comes to mind.......

[Mr. Widget]

Having said all this about cable, the same thing springs to mind about speakers. D66000 comes to mind.......

What does that mean?

Widget

[herki the cat]

While people claim to hear differences, it still boggles my mind on the power cords. House is wired with say 12/2 Romex to the outlet, then you put a $$$ power cord between the outlet in the wall and the plug on the rear of the amp, but you pull the cover on the amp and it's just plain old 12ga copper from the plug to the circuitry in the amp. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how this particular 3ft piece in the entire chain could make such a difference.I say let people buy what they like, but I'm awfully skeptical on this part.

Power Cords....The mystery of the ages is very simple. These wonderfull expensive power cords address Noise and distortion principally from the 60 Hz power line & amplifier power supply solid state rectifiers including digital signal trash...This trash travels around into sensitive amplifiers input circuits via power cords. Professional quality power cords will have two filters consisting of two more cylindrical ferrite cores lumped together surrounding the power wires, each located a few inches from the power cord male & female three prong connectors.

Noise & power line distortion & frequency response of Power Cords can be precisely measured in calibrated set ups matching the source impedance and load impedance seen by typical Power Cord in real life. This is standard laboratory practice used to design these cables.

Vacuum tube rectifiers in vacuum tube amplifiers do not generate this self noise__ Solid state rectifiers store significant levels of energy which they discharge with a nasty (L) times (DI/DT) defining a nearly one kilovolt surge__ one micro second long__ at rectifier current flow cut off, 120 times per second. You can see this trash with a 40 megacycle oscilloscope all over the power transformer circuitry and there is no way you can contain this at the transformer! [I HAVE BEEN THERE]

The standard Industry "IEEE" Specification requires less than 0.50 percent AC power Line Distortion for professional audio service. Typical 60Hz 120 volt power will present with 5 or 7 percent distortion plus very sharp pulses as high as 10 to 30 volts from motors around the neighborhood. Very elegant Active Circuit Power Conditioners are available yielding less than one Percent Distortion. These are Superb Powerful Machines!

Musical Interface inc,. MIT inc., offers a passive filter in a power cord format retailing at $700 MSRP designed by Mr. Richard Marsh that presents a shunt five ohm resistance effective in a band width of 200 Hz to 20,000Hz...This is my favorite because it presents a definite, significant noise clean up, costing like 30 persent of the popular Active Circuit Power Conditioners..

[Mr. Widget]

Power Cords....The mystery of the ages is very simple. These wonderfull expensive power cords address Noise and distortion principally from the 60 Hz power line & amplifier power supply solid state rectifiers including digital signal trash...This trash travels around into sensitive amplifiers input circuits via power cords. Professional quality power cords will have two filters consisting of two more cylindrical ferrite cores lumped together surrounding the power wires, each located a few inches from the power cord male & female three prong connectors.

It is possible that in rare instances a line conditioner or a filter ahead of a modern piece of electronics may help as you describe, but I have talked with numerous manufacturers and they have all said that their supplied $3 power cord is all that is needed to allow you to realize the full potential of their uber expensive piece of gear.

See follow up below with an alternative suggestion...


Widget

[Mr. Widget]

I'll talk about speaker cables here, but the same basics apply to interconnects.

Do speaker cables and interconnects make a difference? The short answer is yes. But, please keep reading. So, what is the best speaker cable? Not so fast. A piece of wire, any wire, will have some resistance, inductance, and capacitance. In a theoretically perfect wire these values would all be zero, in reality they never are. That said, a length of ample gauged speaker cable will effectively be close enough to zero in all three of these parameters. If you use a short run of twisted pair 14/2 or 12/2 for a little longer run these values should all be close enough to the theoretical zero as to impart no influence on the sound. That said, there are audiophile cables that are designed to filter out some of the audio band and color the sound in one way or another by adding inductance and/or capacitance in conjunction with a bit of resistance. They may do this with the construction of the cable itself or they may add an in-line network.

By adding a speaker cable that does affect the sound you are basically adding a passive equalizer into your system. In some cases this may be desirable, in others not so much. The biggest problem with this approach is the lack of control... the same wire can do very different things with loudspeakers of differing designs. Beyond that, you have no idea in advance how it will affect the performance of your system and will be looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack as you try to find the "right" cable for your system. I visited a high end audio cable manufacturer who demo'd a pair of loudspeaker cables with external networks... the advertising for these cables was a bunch on nonsense, but these $16K cables did subjectively "sound better" than a simple 14/2 twisted pair while demo-ing the music they chose. That said, these cables were designed for this system... the speakers and amps did sound their best with this cable, but I doubt a different brand of speakers would benefit from these cables, perhaps even a different model from the same brand would be a disappointment.

So, if you have an unlimited budget of both time and money, you can try one pair of cables after another and you just might find a synergistic combination that sounds a little better than a simple piece of quality wire that costs 50¢ a foot. How much better is a little better? Read my next post.


Widget

[Mr. Widget]

Listening is subjective... we have no choice, we can take objective measurements, but ultimately all listening is subjective. Even a blind or double blind listening session is subjective to some extent. Keep reading...

I recently watched a very intriguing podcast by Stereophile's John Atkinson of Stereophile where he discussed human perception as it relates to audio. He discussed some audio studies that he has participated in as well others that he is familiar with and anecdotal experiences as well. This podcast isn't a typical Stereophile article where potential advertising dollars are at risk... if you are interested I encourage you to slog through the dull bits, there are some significant nuggets in there. His comments don't "answer" the mysteries of audio, but they certainly make you look at many of our everyday audio controversies differently.

In short, he discusses how our expectations can create our aural reality. One example he cites is the initial reaction to the original Edison recordings where they were considered "flawless recreations"... i.e., since people had no previous experience with reproduced audio, even the relatively crude early recordings were perceived as being exact reproductions and indiscernible from the original because people had no expectations. He discusses several other examples of how our experience and expectations color our perception of reality. Another interesting one is a test that was performed at Acoustic Research. In this case there is a flashing light in a dark room... when the light changes location, the viewer's brain keeps it in the previous location and eventually slowly pans it across the field until it is in the correct location instead of simply relocating it... because the viewer thought he knew where it was. (Listen to the podcast, it is pretty intriguing.)

The bottom line, our expectations have such a strong and convincing effect that we are certain when we hear this or that. For example, if a forum member ships me his favorite cables and I hear no change over my typical cables it is likely due to the fact that I didn't expect there to be a difference.... conversely, he was hoping these cables would aid his search for audio nirvana... and when he installs them, they do.

I realize this asks more questions than it answers, but I think it answers how an AC line cord can have an audible effect... an effect that the happy owner is so convinced of, or how a number of other seemingly impossible solutions can make some people satisfied customers when others scratch their heads. I am not suggesting that anyone who has heard a difference with Mpingo discs etc. is a fool... hell, I've heard the difference, but then it faded much like the light in the AR study... but I am suggesting that we need more study in this area.

Widget

[hjames]

Actually, I think you may be misunderstanding the discussion. This is not about proper power supply design and related circuits - its not about ferrite cores or anything like that, this is just about replacing a standard 2 or 3 wire wire cord that goes between the wall outlet and the amp itself with a newer/more expensive cable. Its just a power cord, not the power supply or MOV surge suppressor or any of that - just a power cord. Like this "Cardas Golden Power Cord" thingee for $540 - http://www.revolutionpower.com/p/Car...ower+Cord/228/ Again - the wiring in your wall isn't "this good", the wiring from the back of your receiver to the internal circuit boards isn't "this good" - so why would replacing this one cable in the middle make your sound more transparent, etc ...




Not to pick on Cardas above the others,
they were just the first high end power cord that came up when I did a search.

Power Cords....The mystery of the ages is very simple. These wonderfull expensive power cords address Noise and distortion principally from the 60 Hz power line & amplifier power supply solid state rectifiers including digital signal trash...This trash travels around into sensitive amplifiers input circuits via power cords. Professional quality power cords will have two filters consisting of two more cylindrical ferrite cores lumped together surrounding the power wires, each located a few inches from the power cord male & female three prong connectors. Vacuum tube rectifiers in vacuum tube amplifiers do not generate this self noise__ Solid state rectifiers store significant levels of energy which they discharge with a nasty (L) times (DI/DT) defining a nearly one kilovolt surge__ one micro second long__ at rectifier current flow cut off, 120 times per second. You can see this trash with a 40 megacycle oscilloscope all over the power transformer circuitry and there is no way you can contain this at the transformer! [I HAVE BEEN THERE] The standard Industry "IEEE" Specification requires less than 0.50 percent AC power Line Distortion for professional audio service. Typical 60Hz 120 volt power will present with 5 or 7 percent distortion plus very sharp pulses as high as 10 to 30 volts from motors around the neighborhood. Very elegant active circuit power conditioners are available yielding less than one Percent Distortion. Musical Interface inc,. MIT inc., offers a passive filter retailing at MSPRC $700 designed by Mr. Richard Marsh that presents a shunt five ohm resistance effective in a band width of 200 Hz to 20,000Hz...This is my favorite because it presents a definite, significant noise clean up.

[Titanium Dome]

Having said all this about cable, the same thing springs to mind about speakers. D66000 comes to mind.......

What does that mean?Widget

Uh oh! Fat's about to fall in the fire!

OK, more seriously off the topic of power cords and back toward speaker cables, I've written about my alloy wheel analogy before. I had steel wheels with small hub caps on my Sorento, and it saved a few hundred bucks, but it just looked cheap. Virtually every other Sorento I saw had alloy wheels and looked much cooler. I'm sure they didn't drive faster or better, but they looked better. When I recently got a new car, I got some bitchin' wheels. It's a four banger stick, better mileage, ULEV, etc., but not nearly as powerful as the Sorento, yet man I feel like I'm driving a meaner machine with those fancy wheels. Yes it's perception, but, guess what, unless we're blind we all appreciate with our eyes as well as our ears.

I put those big-ass Monster Cable speaker wires on my K2s because everything else made them look cheap. Of course, I got the Monster Cable used in a pile of Synthesis® gear I snagged in NorCal, and they'd been in my garage for a couple of years, but the point is I like the way the K2s look bi-amped with that b-a wire in its black sheath.

Besides, once we get to the output side of a high power amplifier, things are a bit different than when they came in. I agree that it's hard to imagine anything before the transformers needing anything bigger or better than what's in the wall, but the other side of the transformers is not drawing direct from the wall; it's drawing from the large reservoir of power created in the transformers. So you can certainly use a "garden hose" to fill that reservoir, but you won't be able to tap the full potential of it with a garden hose on the outlet side. If you had a "fire hose" attached there, you could draw all the water you needed up to the limit of the reservoir, then you'd be down to a garden hose trickle again. Of course the good thing about our systems is that they're not like raging fires requiring constant, copious amounts of water. Sometimes we need a little, sometimes we need a lot, and there are even times when we need virtually none.

Yep, it's dicey to mix water and electricity, probably more so in the form of an analogy, but it was the model that was under debate.

My K2s are on a separate 20A circuit that's wired in 12 Ga. so I guess 12 Ga. speaker wire would be perfect, except–

The ATI amps have 14 Ga wire from the power receptacle to the Toroidal Transformers, so I guess 14 Ga. might be plenty, except–

From the transformers to the power modules it's wired in 10 Ga., so maybe I should have 10 Ga. speaker wire!

Well, the super fat Monster Cable wire is regular--I mean superior--12 Ga. copper surrounded by lots of padding, and that will probably be fine, as long as it looks good.

And another thing: the quality and design of the fitting is integral to the usefulness of the hose. If you have no fitting on one or both sides of the hose, then it's not going to be too effective, even if the hose is really expensive. Even if you get the cheapest fittings possible, it'll work better than no fitting, though you might lose some pressure if they leak a bit. Spending a couple of extra dollars on quality fittings that don't leak makes sense. I see a lot of expensive cables that have really stupid fittings on them, mostly user installed/implemented. While I'm not opposed to bare wire, banana plugs, spades, or whatever, I am opposed to stupid implementations of said fittings, such as jamming 12 Ga. wire into a hole that is only big enough for 16. Ga, or haphazardly winding bare wire counter-clockwise around a binding post, or using spades that are obviously to big or too small for the application, or using plugs that are too thin and fall out of the receptacle or too fat and won't slide in past the flex point.

(Shoot, I guess I'd better go down and fix the fittings on those PT250s. )

And here comes Rob with his kickin' shoes on...

[herki the cat]

[QUOTE=hjames;324397]Actually, I think you may be misunderstanding the discussion. This is not about proper power supply design and related circuits.... so why would replacing this one cable in the middle make your sound more transparent, etc ... [quote']

Well, as I posted....To clean up the noise & gossip between system components via the AC power supply interconnections.... The AC power corruption requires AC power conditioners."

We agreed "that if you listen to the thing and you don't like it ...Don't buy it." ....MIT Inc., states "if you make measurements and the results are not satisfactory, you may well be measuring the wrong thing."

MIT Inc., has an excellent free cable loaner library. It's worth a try. herki[quote]

[herki the cat]

[QUOTE=Titanium Dome;324398]Uh oh! Fat's about to fall in the fire!

OK, more seriously off the topic of power cords and back toward speaker cables, I've written about my alloy wheel analogy before. I had steel wheels with small hub caps on my Sorento....Virtually every other Sorento I saw had alloy wheels and looked much cooler. ....I recently got a new car, I got some bitchin' wheels. It's a four banger stick, better mileage, ULEV, etc., but not nearly as powerful as the Sorento, yet man I feel like I'm driving a meaner machine with those fancy wheels. Yes it's perception, but, guess what, unless we're blind we all appreciate with our eyes as well as our ears.

I put those big-ass Monster Cable speaker wires on my K2s because everything else made them look cheap. Of course, I got the Monster Cable used in a pile of Synthesis® gear I snagged in NorCal, and they'd been in my garage for a couple of years, but the point is I like the way the K2s look bi-amped with that b-a wire in its black sheath....{quote]

Titanium Dome, I love what you say. I just purchased my wife a new VW Diesel Golf to replace her old 1902 death trap she prized because of the 40MPG. Every inch of this new VW is awesome & superbly engineered. I stepped out of it today returning from the dentist and I felt like I should work hard, & grow up to be a more mature person, in comparison to that VW.

With Audio, you really need to separate reality from emotion. Visit your High End Dealers and your friends with their fantastic Audio Whatever's, close your eyes & listen carefully when you listen to the music. What else can you do?

The home acoustic environment is cluttered with horrible reverberation sounds, so keep in mind that dealers have $10,000 listening rooms with superb acoustic design. There,you will hear more of the naked sound qualities of the audio hardware. Also, note that, each time, interconnects and speaker cables are handled or changed they do require a few days to break in! This complicates auditioning and comparing cable performance.