Audiophile power cords vs. the cables in your walls

[marty]

Considering isolation does not affect it the same way, I could not say that. Why it happens is mysterious to me. The rest of the spectrum of playback does not benefit or sounds wrong and I can't recommend it for anything but lower range woofer/sub amplification.




Hey Marty,

The power from the wall runs at 60hz, so it always has 60hz on it. Other places in the world are on 50hz and I imagine it is similar.

All power cables create a field around them when they are being used. Certain shielding and wire configurations can change their shapes. Changing any of it will affect more than 60hz on the line (noise etc, technically speaking), but forms of negating other high frequencies has no bearing on this situation IME. There is relatively not much besides 60hz in the low range so I cannot suspect anything else is notable.

Ah, got it. I thought you were referring to conditioning with an external signal source. Thanks for the clarification.

 

[DaveC]

Just FWIW... The EMF surrounding the cable is related to the geometry of the wires, which also determines the electrical characteristics (LCR) or the cable. It's no secret you are looking for low inductance here, higher inductance results in a more intense magnetic field around the cable. Capacitance is less agreed on, but it is typical for capacitance to increase as inductance decreases. Resistance is determined by the cross sectional area and conductor material of course. Shields impinge upon the EMF of the cable and contain it, but this does have an effect on the signal and it's not good. This is mitigated by spacing and a cable geo with a compact EMF.

You can calculate by hand or sim LCR values of different geometries, build cables and hear the differences geo and shielding make.

For PCs and SCs, two cables that drive low impedance loads, thus have high current, geometry matters a little more than ICs. This is why I use ribbon wire. I can get very low inductance without excessive capacitance. If you experiment with braided geo you can achieve results that are clearly better than twisted pair or star quad, it's just much more of a PITA to build or manufacture. My geo has noise rejection like a star-quad with much lower capacitance. It's not better than the ribbon cable for SC and PC though, it is better for ICs.

Commercial cable has a lot of requirements related to abuse and durability, such as it being walked-on, driven over, etc. So most machine made cable conforms to those requirements and has only one conductor for each leg and the result is compromised electrical characteristics. Also, machine made cable often uses moulded plugs with very high resistance connections to the plugs, spot welds. Take a typical power cable and use it as an extension cord on your toaster oven and see how warm the plugs get. This resistance is included in the LCR and thus the effect the cable has on the signal.

The dielectric and jacket also make a difference, but that's not as relevant.

So for an audiophile grade power cable you really want to look into a hand made cable that has symmetrical hot and neutral with the ground external, as in wrapped around the hot/neutral cable, and uses plugs that use wire clamps. And if you use connectors with all the same materials you'll be way ahead of the game. Not gold.

Some would say all that matters is end to end resistance, but even here you want plugs with wire clamps and not moulded plugs, which will have variable resistance. But most component's power supplies are not as isolated from upstream effects as most assume. Boulder amplifier has claimed to make a power supply without cable dependence. I'm sure it's possible to make the effects inaudible, but that's not 99.999% of gear you'll be buying.