Power cords - do they really make a difference, other than potentially reduce noise?

stehno

Well-Known Member
Jul 5, 2014
1,585
456
405
Salem, OR
I need to upgrade power cords for my height channels which are active speakers. The cables need to be around 3 meters long, better than average quality and relatively easy to manage since they need to run up toward the ceiling and I don't want garden hoses snaking around my listening room. Since these are surrounds I don't want to break the bank I would like to come in at around $100 or so each. I am open to suggestions and am considering Pangea. Thanks

IME, power cables can only provide a small percentage of sonic benefits compared to superior line conditioning. But if one is focused on power cables alone, $100 could easily get you an excellent bang for the buck.

I've a $100 custom PC I keep on hand that includes Furutech terminators (cryo-treated) and custom stranded copper wire (cryo treated). This cable outperformed my $2400 power cable (which I sold) and was about even up with a $6000 Stage III power cable a distributor asked me to use when exhibiting at an audio show. I didn't have the heart to tell the distributor at the time that his $6k PC was not superior to my $100 custom PC.

You might try Take 5 Audio. They seem to cryo most everything they sell (like Furutech who supposedly cryo's everything they sell). I've purchased two 12ft. cryo'ed power cables from Take 5 for about $120 each several years ago. I installed Furutech terminators at either end and burned them in using home appliances but never had need for them in my system so never "listened" to them.

The cryo'ing process is really the secret sauce here. I would never bother with any cable that is not cryo'ed. At the very least that process is the great equalizer for perhaps any type of cable. If superior materials, craftsmanship, and cryo'ing methodology are employed, such a cable should easily edge out perhaps any cable that has not been cryo'ed.

BTW, With the right materials and connections in a PC you should easily hear distinct audible performance gains over stock PC's. But bear in mind that a PC generally takes roughly 5 days of continuous use before its fully burned in. A 10ft PC will probably take several more days. Until full burn-in, it may even sound worse than the PC's being replaced.
 
Last edited:

DaveC

Industry Expert
Nov 16, 2014
3,899
2,141
495
^ I'd agree... A lot of the benefits of aftermarket power cables are from the wire-clamp connection made at the plugs which is included in even the cheapest plugs, and a fairly effective cable can be made using a twisted pair of 12g wires with the ground rotating around the twisted pair in the opposite direction. Even using cheap wire and plugs, this will easily outperform a molded cord and might even be as good as some commercial cables. I also agree cryo helps most types of wire and is inexpensive to have done.

Of course, if you're looking for the best then plated pure copper contacts, high quality wire, slightly different geometry and attention to mechanical damping are also important but a basic cable that costs very little can get decent increases in performance.
 

stehno

Well-Known Member
Jul 5, 2014
1,585
456
405
Salem, OR
^ I'd agree... A lot of the benefits of aftermarket power cables are from the wire-clamp connection made at the plugs which is included in even the cheapest plugs, and a fairly effective cable can be made using a twisted pair of 12g wires with the ground rotating around the twisted pair in the opposite direction. Even using cheap wire and plugs, this will easily outperform a molded cord and might even be as good as some commercial cables. I also agree cryo helps most types of wire and is inexpensive to have done.

Of course, if you're looking for the best then plated pure copper contacts, high quality wire, slightly different geometry and attention to mechanical damping are also important but a basic cable that costs very little can get decent increases in performance.

You agree that cryo'ing helps most types of wire? By helps, do you mean the improvement is barely audible? Can you list any type of wire in high-end audio that might not benefit?

Per chance, do you cryo your cables? Just an honest question as there are many fine cable manufacturers who do not.
 

Barry2013

VIP/Donor
Oct 12, 2013
2,305
487
418
Essex UK
I recently upgraded the power cable on my Audience AR8 to the Audience AU 24SE and fitted a Phonosophie Gold fuse to it and there was a significant improvement to the sound quality. Yesterday I fitted a another one to the Entreq Challenger 3V power cable to the Vitus SIA 025 power cable with similar results. I have another two on the way so impressed am I by the results.
Unfortunately they are no longer in production but on the basis of this experience I am in no doubt that the combination of a good power cable and a high end fuse is a really effective investment.
Sorry if it is a bit off topic but power cable/fuse are two sides of the same coin in my experience.
 

DaveC

Industry Expert
Nov 16, 2014
3,899
2,141
495
You agree that cryo'ing helps most types of wire? By helps, do you mean the improvement is barely audible? Can you list any type of wire in high-end audio that might not benefit?

Per chance, do you cryo your cables? Just an honest question as there are many fine cable manufacturers who do not.

Those are details I'd rather not answer in public as I've taken a lot of time testing. But I would say some wire benefits enormously while with other wire it does absolutely nothing.
 

NorthStar

Member
Feb 8, 2011
24,305
1,323
435
Vancouver Island, B.C. Canada
Cyro is used on some guitar strings, frets, in the automobile industry, on screws, on brakes, on engines and it helps in slowing down corrosion.
So, on wires I'm sure it benefits too...including power chords.
{I googled it, and have read the science behind it.}
 

DaveC

Industry Expert
Nov 16, 2014
3,899
2,141
495
I was wondering how cryo'ing makes a difference once the wire returns to room temperature?

It does two things... relieves stress cause by forming processes and changes the crystal structure of metals. For wire the crystal structure is very important and makes a big difference in how the wire sounds and even it's conductivity, and the drawing process introduces internal stresses in the wire.

Cryo is very common when rebuilding diesel motors and firearms as well.
 

witchdoctor

Well-Known Member
Apr 23, 2016
337
5
148
Thanks, I appreciate the tip. I will checkout Take 5. These are pulling surround duty so I need to use a local outlet for each one. Monster has a plugin surge protector with very simple conditioning but at least it is better than nothing and its cheap. My equipment is plugged into a Monster HTPS 7000 conditioner which I really like, it has saved my equipment from damage many times. It also has a volt meter on the front and feeds my equipment a steady 120v. That meter almost never reads 120v coming out of the wall, usually around 122
 

witchdoctor

Well-Known Member
Apr 23, 2016
337
5
148
The 3 things I always keep in my living room, cryoed power cables, diesel engines and firearms. What a coincidence:D
 

NorthStar

Member
Feb 8, 2011
24,305
1,323
435
Vancouver Island, B.C. Canada
http://www.stealthaudiocables.com/cryo.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenics
_______

"[h=5]06 September, 2005, 06:05:16 PM[/h]

From;

http://www.frozensolidaudio.com/Freezing Issue.htm


"The speaker cables arrived first. Max [Townshend] delivered them in person (together with a car-full of Seismic Sink products, of which more on another occasion) so that we could listen to the differences together. Townshend cables already use annealed copper because Max had found that it sounds better: DCT is, in effect, a super annealing process, and it was quickly apparent that the cable with the cryo-copper sounded better still. I've now done the comparison many times, and the difference continues to astound me. The DCT cable has greater resolution and a notably airier, more natural sound - to such an extent that, having heard it for himself, Max returned home and immediately arranged for a first batch of copper to go to Frozen Solid for treatment. Cryo versions of his cables will be available by the time you read this.

Because DCT has the effect of reducing copper's resistance somewhat, it was important to check that the audible differences could not be explained away by small changes in frequency response at the loudspeaker terminals. To test for this I used MLSSA to measure the difference when using the two cables. You can see the outcome in Fig 1. MLSSA gives a rather noisy plot at this resolution (I could have used smoothing to disguise it) but even so it is clear that the disparity in frequency response is comfortably within +/ - 0.01dB across the entire audible frequency range - much too small a difference to account for the significant change in sound quality.

If anything the interconnect cables, when they arrived a little later proved even greater a revelation than the speaker cables. Max had identified them as A, B and C, and only when I told him that I vastly preferred pair C over the other two did he confirm that this was indeed the cryogenically treated set. Once again, the sound of the treated cables was characterized by manifestly superior transparency. Music was dynamic in a way that simply eluded the other two cables (one annealed, the other not) - more finely etched and yet more weighty and punchy too.

Delighted as I am with the outcome of this experiment (although I don't imagine for one moment it will change the minds of those who regard cables sonics as a figment of others' imaginations) I have now to concede, rather like Scott trudging forlornly up to the South Pole that someone got there before me. While the copper was with Frozen Solid being treated, I stumbled across a Pearl advert in a 1993 issue of Glass Audio that mentioned cryogenic treatment of vacuum tubes.

Some web searching soon revealed that Ed Meitner was the man behind this; that he had performed similar experiments to mine with cables, and a great deal else besides, a decade and more ago; and that he'd actually sold cryogenically treated cables for a while under the Museatex brand. For some obscure reason this all passed me by at the time, despite a fair few column inches being devoted to the subject in magazines like. Stereophile
[GET THEE HENCE!].


I tracked Ed down to his company EMM Labs in Calgary Canada and spoke to him on the telephone about his many experiments with DCT and why his pioneering work has slowly slipped from view. You can read what he told me in the accompanying panel. I must say even after that conversation, I remain puzzled. Having heard for myself the astonishing effect of cryogenically treating the copper in speaker and interconnect cables, I can't imagine how this process and its benefits could fade into obscurity. As Ed Meitner himself says, it can't be due to cost because - in the context of high-end gear, at any rate - it is swamped by all those digits in the price tag. Although Meitner still uses cryogenic treatment himself, for everyone else in the audio industry it appears to have been a case of NIH (not invented here) or maybe IDU (I don't understand). Perhaps things will be different this second time around. And before you ask, yes - I will be striving to find some way of quantifying the sonic difference DCT so obviously makes.
Ed Meitner of EMM Labs

INTERVIEW

Here Ed Meitner of EMM Labs talks about his pioneering work with cryogenic treatment.

'We know what copper looks like under heavy magnification - it has a very erratic lattice structure, and we know that this comes from the way it is made. Most materials come from a liquid and are shocked, more or less, into a solid. So the lattice structure of the material isn't in its natural state. What this does is produce stress, residual stress.

'If you treat the material at low temperatures, where the strength of the atomic bonds starts to diminish it reverts to the natural crystal structure. So this process relieves the residual stress. It is a function of temperature and time. The absolute temperature doesn't matter very much, but if you only go down to, say, -200ºF it may take several weeks. If we take it down to liquid nitrogen temperatures then it happens much faster. Our treatment time for copper was 12 hours on the way down, 12 hours soak, and 12 hours back. You don't want to go too fast: then you put thermal stresses into the material and break it."


WHy have I posted this?

Firstly, Mr. Howard claims to have easily discerned the 'frozen' interconnects - to have blind-tested them.

Secondly, I think de-stressed or 'relaxed' conductors sound like a good idea. I've always treated cables (especially headphone cords, which obviously get handled a lot)) carefully, for this reason

bring it on.


R."
_______

? https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourcei...&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=cyrogenics+in+audio+cables
 

stehno

Well-Known Member
Jul 5, 2014
1,585
456
405
Salem, OR
Those are details I'd rather not answer in public as I've taken a lot of time testing. But I would say some wire benefits enormously while with other wire it does absolutely nothing.

I too have spent some time evaluating the effects of objects being cryo-treated for both electrical and mechanical purposes. But certainly less time that you.

For a while now I’ve been having every cable I've owned (including 500 ft. of Romex for my 4 dedicated lines) either single or double cryo’ed and by both vapor and full-immersion methods and with both copper and silver wire.

My understanding is that imperfections (fractures, etc) with wire are fairly universal as is the cryo’ing process’ that minimizes those imperfections. So I’m a little puzzled when you say some wire benefits “enormously” or exhibits “big differences” while even a single wire that when cryo’ed would not better retain a signal’s fidelity regardless of wire type or its use.

I’d be interested in your giving just one example of one type of wire that when cryo’ed provided no benefit whatsoever.
 

About us

  • What’s Best Forum is THE forum for high end audio, product reviews, advice and sharing experiences on the best of everything else. This is THE place where audiophiles and audio companies discuss vintage, contemporary and new audio products, music servers, music streamers, computer audio, digital-to-analog converters, turntables, phono stages, cartridges, reel-to-reel tape machines, speakers, headphones and tube and solid-state amplification. Founded in 2010 What’s Best Forum invites intelligent and courteous people of all interests and backgrounds to describe and discuss the best of everything. From beginners to life-long hobbyists to industry professionals, we enjoy learning about new things and meeting new people, and participating in spirited debates.

Quick Navigation

User Menu

Steve Williams
Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator
Ron Resnick
Site Co-Owner | Administrator
Julian (The Fixer)
Website Build | Marketing Managersing