$200 Power Cord

[Steve Haynie]

Is this $200 power cord really worth the price? Instead of a 16 gauge wire your get 14 gauge. It just supplies power to your amp. According to the manufacturer and the reviews your amp sounds so much better. For the same price you can get a power conditioner that will supply a constant power to all your gear.

[polara]

Seriously.

Unless your house was built by a freakin' audiophile with virgin gold-sputtered unobtanium wiring going into NOS GE bakelite receptacles, what difference is the last 5 feet of a hundred-mile path from coal-burning generator to your amp gonna make?

Poor Jimi. How'd he manage to even PLAY in the pre-bootek era?

[JohnnyB]

Seriously.

Unless your house was built by a freakin' audiophile with virgin gold-sputtered unobtanium wiring going into NOS GE bakelite receptacles, what difference is the last 5 feet of a hundred-mile path from coal-burning generator to your amp gonna make?

Think about the last 5 feet in your house or studio, where the power cord encounters things it never "sees" between the power plant and the wall receptacle: The power cord in home audio, studio, and PA mixing boards may cross several line level interconnects as well as other power cords. Most power cords are unshielded and thus can introduce electrical noise into the signal-carrying cables. If you only view the power cord as a power delivery device whose influence is limited to the cord itself, and not a noise source that pollutes other lines, of course it wouldn't make much sense for a power cord to influence sound quality. When you consider power line noise infecting other signal lines or simply infecting the signal processing parts of a console or amplifier, there are plausible explanations for a power cord affecting sound quality.

There is not a user of aftermarket power cords who didn't start out as a skeptic, myself included. Once I tried one out, I have since used aftermarket power cords for the past 16 years. I've had 10 different ones in my house and still have 7. All of them are shielded and the conductors are wound or woven to reject noise. Two of them have ferrite particles embedded in the outer shroud to add more shielding and to neutralize static electricity buildup that occurs in insulators. I am almost certainly the only person in this thread who has actually used and compared premium power cords. Just because one doesn't know why there is an audible difference doesn't mean there's no difference. And no amount of speculation without experience can prove anything.

[Armitage]

Like I pointed out (and gave a link) pages ago, using shielded power cords is a usefull addition to keep them from broadcasting to your other cables... and they're under $10.

[polara]

Half the places I've played, and most venues, would be better served by hiring an exorcist/electrician to fix the countless hums and wobbles before I'd worry about my batteries, power cables, or even guitar cables.

I know this is all technically true, but when I play electric guitar, it's to rawk my balls off. I'm not playing Mozart on a Stradivarius in Lincoln Center. Audiophilia seems out of context.

[JohnnyB]

Like I pointed out (and gave a link) pages ago, using shielded power cords is a usefull addition to keep them from broadcasting to your other cables... and they're under $10.

Yes, I linked to a similar product a year ago in this thread (2M shielded 14 ga. for $7.98). It was the second response, but somehow subsequent responses turned it into a hate thread about high end audio anyway.

[JohnnyB]

Half the places I've played, and most venues, would be better served by hiring an exorcist/electrician to fix the countless hums and wobbles before I'd worry about my batteries, power cables, or even guitar cables.

Yeah, and that'll happen about the same time a tooth fairy leaves a dollar under your pillow. Why not use shielded AC cables? They don't cost much, and may eliminate some of the hum and buzz.

I know this is all technically true, but when I play electric guitar, it's to rawk my balls off. I'm not playing Mozart on a Stradivarius in Lincoln Center.

Buzzy hi-gain overdriven RAWK in a shitty electrically noisy dive does not exclusively represent this forum either. There are:

• Acoustic performers
• Living room noodlers
• Giggers who play a range of music from clean to dirty
• Bass players who need a wide range, clean, dynamic power source and signal
• Anybody who uses PA systems
• Home or professional studios

Every one but overdriven electric guitar can benefit from lowering the noise floor and rejecting interference. I never could tell a difference with a premium cable on a Mesa DC-10, but I sure noticed it with my Eden bass rig, even gigging at a 105-year-old waterfront dive.

Audiophilia seems out of context.

Pro audio, bass amplfication, and even guitar amps borrow from audiophile. Class D amplification was invented as a 250 wpc high end stereo amp by Infinity in 1975. It later showed up in the Crate Powerblock and is used in a great number of the compact lightweight bass heads offered by major manufacturers. The same for neodymium magnets. Those have been used in high end speakers going back to the '80s. Combine Class D amplification with neodymium speaker magnets and you get the entire Gallien-Krueger Ultralight Series. Bass amps and PAs also implement high end concepts such as stiff, light, aluminum, kevlar, or graphite-woven cones and large diameter voice coils for their speaker drivers. Let's not forget crossovers and titanium diaphragm horns and tweeters, also a staple of bass amps.

The Thiele speaker cabinet is totally a product of high end audio. It's the reason you can get massive bass out of a small cabinet.

Because of class D amps' higher switching noise and closer relationship to the AC coming from the wall, they may exhibit audible benefits from a helixed, shielded AC cord that wouldn't be noticeable in an A/B amp, let alone a guitar combo with its rolled off treble.

[BadgerDave]

All right, Johnny, you make a convincing case for the power cord.

You'll really impress me if you can justify paying $10 for a block of wood!

http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CRMWDN%20%20%20%20L6

or

http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CRMWB%20%20%20%20%20S6

Seriously, I think this is the kind of thing that discredits the audiophile industry, at least in many people's minds. Perhaps there is a logical explaination, and benefit to lifting cables off the floor, but $65.00 for something that you can get for a cople of bucks (or free) from a local lumber yard? Does wood type matter in this application? Is wood better than plastic (or cardboard)? Is wood really a good material for isolating vibrations between audio components?

Or did someone at Cardas just come up with an idea to make a 1000% profit on a supply of scrap myrtle wood?

If I remember correctly, the item description used to tout the acoustic benefits of myrtle and has been revised to describe the attractiveness of the wood.

This is absolutely not an attack on JohnnyB, who is one of the smartest and most consistantly helpful contributors to this community. It is a bit of a poke at Audio Advisor, however.

[Victor (Fret Friend)]

That's ^^^ a joke right...

[MCChris]

Here's an elegant way to keep vibration out of your hi-fi and home theater components. It's the Cardas Golden Cuboid, made from America's most beautiful hardwood, the legendary Myrtle tree. Rarest of all woods, this symmetrical, broadleaf, evergreen Myrtle grows only in Southwestern Oregon (Coos and Curry Counties) and the Biblical Holy Lands.

A tip of the cap from this marketing copywriter to whoever wrote this, especially the final three words, the typed equivalent of the right hand Tommy Hearns used to finish off Pepino Cuevas.

[polara]

As an ad man, it gave me wood just to read it.

[jwhitcomb3]

I was cursed/blessed with a hypersensitive sense of smell. I rarely get food poisoning because I can almost always tell if food has even begun to spoil. The years my kids were toilet training were a living hell (and smell hell part II is coming along as they hit puberty).

I have some other random gifts. For instance, I can tell if someone is running a fever by touching their forehead. The only time my family breaks out a thermometer is when I'm not home.

So I have to give audiophiles the benefit of the doubt that many can hear nuances in sound that I cannot. Or, more precisely, that they have a strong preferance for one tonality over another, whereas I can often discern differences in tonality, but do not have a strong preference. I have a nice high end suite of EQ and compressor plug-ins for my DAW I listen to through decent set of active monitors, and I can tweak up a bunch of very different sounds for a mix, but many times I get down to several very different mixes that I'm equally happy with. Not color blind, so much as color indifferent. I've sat in with a couple of mastering engineers who amazed me with their prowess at finding and fixing problems in the mix. I know there are some folks with amazing ears out there, and I do not pretend to be one of them.

Like anything else, the audiophile industry is not immune to marketing hyperbole. I sometimes wonder how many self styled audiophiles really have the super hearing, and how many are just really susceptible to marketing influence.

[MCChris]

Like anything else, the audiophile industry is not immune to marketing hyperbole. I sometimes wonder how many self styled audiophiles really have the super hearing, and how many are just really susceptible to marketing influence.

Subject 'em to the Pepsi challenge. Only way to find out for sure.

[Steve Haynie]

Like anything else, the audiophile industry is not immune to marketing hyperbole. I sometimes wonder how many self styled audiophiles really have the super hearing, and how many are just really susceptible to marketing influence.

Subject 'em to the Pepsi challenge. Only way to find out for sure.

A Pepsi challenge? Hmmm... If someone does not pass they could take that as a blessing. It would mean the person would NOT have to spend money on the top tier audiophile items to get to the optimum level of listening pleasure. For those who could hear the difference there would be no end to what they must spend to find the limits of their own hearing.

Maybe we could have a stereo system test center where we could charge $500 bucks for someone to sit in a chair listening to stereos for a few hours.

[Toadroller]

As a former audio nut governed largely by pragmatic budgeting (I'm just not hearing $500 worth of difference here!), I'm amazed at what I've learned about sound by way of electric guitars and amplifiers whose approach is purposeful distortion whereas audio equipment attempts to avoid distortion.

It's helped me listen to audio more critically, and changes in equalization jump out at me.

I'm also in my mid forties, and the changes in my hearing, eyesight, and physical condition are pissing me off.

[killerteddybear]

I'm also in my mid forties, and the changes in my hearing, eyesight, and physical condition are pissing me off.

I'm ten years ahead of you. It just gets worse.

[JohnnyB]

All right, Johnny, you make a convincing case for the power cord.

You'll really impress me if you can justify paying $10 for a block of wood!

http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CRMWDN%20%20%20%20L6

or

http://www.audioadvisor.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CRMWB%20%20%20%20%20S6

Seriously, I think this is the kind of thing that discredits the audiophile industry, at least in many people's minds. Perhaps there is a logical explanation, and benefit to lifting cables off the floor, but $65.00 for something that you can get for a cople of bucks (or free) from a local lumber yard? Does wood type matter in this application? Is wood better than plastic (or cardboard)? Is wood really a good material for isolating vibrations between audio components?

Or did someone at Cardas just come up with an idea to make a 1000% profit on a supply of scrap myrtle wood?

If I remember correctly, the item description used to tout the acoustic benefits of myrtle and has been revised to describe the attractiveness of the wood.

This is absolutely not an attack on JohnnyB, who is one of the smartest and most consistently helpful contributors to this community. It is a bit of a poke at Audio Advisor, however.

OK. I'll bite.

First we need to adjust our frame of reference. High end audio has gone well beyond the basic concept of full frequency range reproduction with a hazy sweep of left-to-right placement of voices and musicians. Today's high end systems are more like virtual reality devices, where almost every sonic cue from the performance is reproduced, including a sense of the dimensions of the recording or performance venue, the timing and interaction among the musicians, etc. The signal-to-noise ratio of these systems is around 110-125 dB, which approaches the range of human hearing. There is something compelling to be able to experience Miles Davis, Nat Cole, Sinatra, Jascha Heifetz, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus making music in your living room, or Zep, Jeff Beck, the Who, Kiss, and the Beatles sounding like you were an ear-witness in the studio. With high-def audio, you don't just hear the music, you hear how the great artists made the music, and that's a compelling motivation to recreate as much of the experience of these great masters as you can. Especially since many of these geniuses have left us.

For comparison, the gear we listened to in the '70s and '80s, the gear that sets the reference of our memories, is of the so-called (and overrated) golden age of stereo, where the s/n ratio seldom got above 60 dB. That's why back then there was no demand for special cables, speaker stands, equipment stands, and vibration controlling footers. When you lower the electronic noise floor another 50 dB, then cabinet vibration, static electricity, speaker resonances, component microphonics, and sloppy signal transfer become apparent and get in the way of enjoying what that lower 50 dB has to offer in the virtual reality experience.

Some cable designs are more vulnerable to static electricity than others, and some flooring materials (e.g., wool carpet, vinyl flooring) store and release more static electricity than others. There are probably many well-heeled audiophile with wool carpeting. So if you have a $50-100K audio system with a signal-to-noise ratio of around 125 dB, do you think the music would sound better without static electricity invading the speaker cable, where it wouldn't be noticeable with an s/n of 60 dB?

Even audiophiles like to save money where they can. The most common cable elevator is empty vacuum tube boxes. For those without tube boxes, the next low-cost alternative would be this, comprised of a toilet paper roll, a toothpick, and a rubber band:

However, you have $1500 equipment racks with oiled cherry shelves, a stack of components with 1/4" thick brushed anodized aluminum faceplates, and some gorgeous Italian speakers built up from solid cherry staves:

They sound better with the cables off the carpet. The audiophile may be happy with tube boxes to lift the cables, but his wife/girlfriend isn't. $64 is a small amount to reach an esthetically pleasing compromise, especially when fancier lifts can hit $30 each.

Should blocks of wood cost $10 each? In the world of manufacturing, the general rule of thumb is that a product is priced at four times the cost of manufacture. So if the blocks retail at $10, they should cost around $2.50 each to make. By my reckoning of myrtlewood lumber prices, the wood would cost about 10 cents for each block. So would it cost $2.40 in labor to cut and emboss each block? It's possible. Remember, this is a niche market where you can't mass produce the item, making the cost per unit go up. The blocks require several cuts on a band saw and have to be identical from unit to unit. If the machinist is making $30/hour is it unreasonable that it takes him 5 minutes to cut, emboss, and finish one? That's your $2.50 mfg. cost right there, and that's why if you're a DIYer, $10 sounds outrageous.

As for the blocks used for equipment footers, I use vibration controlling footers on most of my electronics, and I like their effect. Just about every electronic component has at least one transformer, vibrating at either 60 or 50 Hz depending on what country you live in. Furthermore, certain components sharing the chassis, especially capacitors, are microphonic to vibration. So with the 100-110 dB s/n ratio of my electronics, do I hear an improvement with Vibrapod footers which drain vibration from the transformer and isolate the chassis from vibration in the room? You bet.

If you go with a block of wood, the most logical choices would be briar, myrtlewood, or olive wood, all of which are non-uniform, twisted, and gnarly. This random composition helps quell resonances, and is a heck of a lot cheaper to harvest than to develop your own non-resonant polymer.

[MCChris]

The audiophile may be happy with tube boxes to lift the cables, but his wife/girlfriend isn't.

Audiophiles have wives/girlfriends? Now that's an interesting concept.

[hamerhead]

They do, but they're deaf.

[JohnnyB]

The audiophile may be happy with tube boxes to lift the cables, but his wife/girlfriend isn't.

Audiophiles have wives/girlfriends? Now that's an interesting concept.

Gee, I dunno. Does your brother-in-law have a girlfriend?

[MCChris]

The audiophile may be happy with tube boxes to lift the cables, but his wife/girlfriend isn't.

Audiophiles have wives/girlfriends? Now that's an interesting concept.

Gee, I dunno. Does your brother-in-law have a girlfriend?

He used to have a wife. But she left him for another man. Correlation?

[JohnnyB]

The audiophile may be happy with tube boxes to lift the cables, but his wife/girlfriend isn't.

Audiophiles have wives/girlfriends? Now that's an interesting concept.

Gee, I dunno. Does your brother-in-law have a girlfriend?

He used to have a wife. But she left him for another man. Correlation?

I got the impression that you didn't like him even before he bought his McIntosh/BMW mega-rig. Subsequently your dislike of him formed your general opinion of audiophiles. He is hardly representative.

[MCChris]

I got the impression that you didn't like him even before he bought his McIntosh/BMW mega-rig. Subsequently your dislike of him formed your general opinion of audiophiles. He is hardly representative.

Nah, I liked him. Still do. He's just fucking insufferable. Again, correlation?

[JohnnyB]

I got the impression that you didn't like him even before he bought his McIntosh/BMW mega-rig. Subsequently your dislike of him formed your general opinion of audiophiles. He is hardly representative.

Nah, I liked him. Still do. He's just fucking insufferable. Again, correlation?

How's he insufferable? Talks all the time about minutia? Pompous? Fussy?

[Caddie]

A $200 power cable? Really?! Does that cable come with Pamela Andersen (wasn't she an electrician on ToolTime or was she an allround tool expert) butt crack, tool belt n everything? Then put me down for 2.

[Hamer Dave]

It once cost me $369.99 for a power cord for a portable multi-band radio.

$1.99 for the actual cord, plus $350 to repair the rocker panel on my car, as I backed into some stupid landscape bolder on the side of the driveway while exiting the Radio Shack.