Do power cables make a difference to sound quality?

Sounds like it’s going to be a good trip. I hope you enjoy it.

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Safe travels!

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Aaaah, welcome back. How was your sleep? Rested and full of power I see. Here in Europe we are quite bored. We almost concluded and closed this topic without you.
We missed you :smiley:

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Jan, my wife and I love travelling. Post covid, I will bring my Furutech Flux 50 filter for a quick demo in your system, when we hit Europe again :grin:

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Is this relevant? It’s good to hear, but nobody has suggested that psychological disorders might play a part.

Yep, hopefully most of us.

That was fine, right up until you used the word ‘verify’. Verify: to make certain or prove that something is true or accurate. As most of us remain stubbornly uncertain, and there still isn’t any proof, I suspect the phrase ‘think we hear’ might be a better choice than ‘verify’.

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This thread has strayed so far off-topic and is laced with so much incivility that I’m not even sure where to begin moderating. :sweat_smile:

The off-topic back-and-forth hasn’t improved the discussion, and it’s blowing up the post count which can ruin the experience for others.

So let’s switch to slow-mode to encourage more considered responses. Please remember to stay on topic, and keep it civil. Thank you!

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The lack of civility was quite off-putting. I admire your restraint. Thank you for the redirect.

Under normal circumstances, the ground wire, or CPC (Circuit Protective Conductor) as it is known here in the UK should not be carrying any significant current. It is solely there for the purposes of electrical safety to shunt fault currents to earth and interrupt the supply via earth leakage detection, or worst case via the appliance fuse(!) Anything exceeding 30mA here in the UK will cause the residual current device (RCD/RCBO) for the circuit in the consumer unit to interrupt the supply.

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another aspect. Talk to the pro-audio guys. Literally those who create the music some audiophiles find only consumable through $$$$ cables. No fancy stuff there. Almost never. Decent, say Mogami products, yes. Never at a price point that is being discussed here.
Guess why? :wink:

I work with pro-audio guys in large and small studios. I know small studios who have very expensive cabling. Andy Jackson, Pink Floyd engineer, uses expensive cabling at his own mastering studio and at David Gilmour’s Astoria boat studio. Large studios tend not to. I have asked this question…Why?
(1) they are run as businesses and they buy thousands of metres of cabling. The procurement people will ensure the cable is cheap.
(2) Furthermore they have a lot of staff - if you put a cable worth hundreds of pounds into a studio which many techies and clients reside in, it may not remain there.
(3) strange though it may seem to you but fewer engineers than you might expect have great audiophile ears. Remember these guys have come up through a technical education and are good with tech. They are not trained to have good ears. They are engineers. Do not expect them to hear or care about the subtleties of ‘air’, of PRaT, of holographic sound. Just listen to the brick-walling of a lot of post 1995 mastering and you will understand that not all engineers understand the essence and subtlety of high-fidelity musical reproduction.

But some do. Speak to the aforementioned Andy Jackson and you’ll hear an audiophile engineer speak sense. Here he Paul White interviewing Andy in Sound on Sound magazine…

Having a recording studio on a boat must throw up a few unique technical issues, especially where grounding is concerned, and I wondered whether the Astoria was equipped with a copper anchor! “I’ve always thought we should just ground it straight into the river but no, we have gone to great lengths to optimise the electrics there, including fancy cable and the whole works. I do the same here in my mastering studio — it’s all esoteric cable, exotic mains leads and a special braided grounding cable. No doubt I’ll be shot down in flames about this, but when I changed the regular earth cable for the woven one it sounded better, even though the grounding was electrically fine before.”

I was interested to hear this, as we’ve tried to do listening tests on cables in the past and we sometimes hear quite big differences, but the results are hard or impossible to replicate when you take the cables to a different studio. “Absolutely,” agrees Jackson. "I’ve found exactly this when I go to James Guthrie’s place in Northern California, being pretty adamant about how I want to do something because it works at home. Then we find it sounds totally different in his room so we have to come up with a different solution. That’s really annoying because the subject of cables is such a minefield anyway! I’ve got to the point where I just call it voodoo and let somebody else worry about the physics behind it. I set myself up to be shot down in flames and then just ignore the people who are doing the shooting!

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Hmmmmm…

We have explained countless times that anybody who cares to listen will hear differences, we do not understand why. So his comment makes perfect sense. Yes we know many will so badly want to believe its due to external factors, we get it. @Duckworp , excellent post

So when you hear new sounds and voices by using a nice audio cable, you are called an audiophile. When you just hear new sounds and voices without an audio cable, you are called nuts. :laughing:
(Just messing around, not taking sides, not meant to offend)

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Sounds to me like a really good example of external factors. You can hear a difference in one place, but not another. Changing the location (which is an external factor) changes the sound.

Let me give you a different example. Imagine a pharmaceutical company bring out a new pain killer, but they state that it will only work at home. It won’t work if you take it on a bus, or in a park, or in a recording studio. Just at home. Would you buy it? No, because you’d probably decide that it has no pharmacological properties worth mentioning.

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I don’t know if this has been mentioned in the preceding 842 replies, but given that most buildings use regular electrical cable behind the wall and cheap outlets into which you plug your equipment, how can a quality cable between the outlet and a piece of audio equipment make a positive difference? I would have to conclude that this is snake oil.

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It may have been touched upon :wink:

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Of course it is snake oil - many of us have already expressed the same scientific fact around here, i.e. that a short piece of “premium” cable will not fix anything or replace those hundreds of meters from the normal grid, in so far as “clean” energy is concerned (not the latter means anything to SQ anyway).

Everything read you must.:blush:

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This is only mentioned in every single power cable thread for about dozen times.

Anyway, every metre matters. Car analogies are favorite among audiophiles so let’s say that you drive 100km trip and 98km of it is dirt road and last 2km is highway. Your trip is quicker and more comfortable with 2km of highway in the end compared to all 100km being dirt road.

You can obviously change all the wiring at your house if you like to go to extreme but I like to think that what comes from the socket is given and all I can do is make sure the last few metres are well taken care of. In apartment building there’s not much you can do to house wiring anyway.

This analogy is completely wrong. It’s not even analogy. It’s not about speed. If you want to have car analogy, it can be more like about fuel and seat comfort feeling. If you use 98 octane instead of 95, you will not feel more comfortable in seat.

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The answer is so obvious, listen for yourself and decide whether you can trust what you hear, or dismiss it as a monetary lapse of reason. The deniers have created the perfect argument by confirming that their own bias is so strong that any difference they hear…well is in the mind. I urge you to listen my friends, don’t let your preconceived notions get in the way. You can do it, trust your hearing.

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