Why Power Cables Affect Sound


I just bought a new CD player and was underwhelmed with it compared to my cheaper, lower quality CD player. That’s when it hit me that my cheaper CD player is using an upgraded power cable. When I put an upgraded power cable on my new CD player, the sound was instantly transformed: the treble was tamed, the music was more dynamic and lifelike, and overall more musical. 

This got me thinking as to how in the world a power cable can affect sound. I want to hear all of your ideas. Here’s one of my ideas:

I have heard from many sources that a good power cable is made of multiple gauge conductors from large gauge to small gauge. The electrons in a power cable are like a train with each electron acting as a train car. When a treble note is played, for example, the small gauge wires can react quickly because that “train” has much less mass than a large gauge conductor. If you only had one large gauge conductor, you would need to accelerate a very large train for a small, quick treble note, and this leads to poor dynamics. A similar analogy might be water in a pipe. A small pipe can react much quicker to higher frequencies than a large pipe due to the decreased mass/momentum of the water in the pipe. 

That’s one of my ideas. Now I want to hear your thoughts and have a general discussion of why power cables matter. 

If you don’t think power cables matter at all, please refrain from derailing the conversation with antagonism. There a time and place for that but not in this thread please. 
128x128mkgus
mrdecibel
Through our phone’s speakers, I hear the acoustic differences of his voice from each one of his surroundings.

That’s nothing. When I do the TT over the phone I can hear the change in the customer’s system, when he has it on and playing music. The change is fast as the speed of light. Of course, the TT works even without the system being on. The customer has the option of listening to the phone whilst I’m doing the TT. Some prefer not to. 😬 The TT works even when the customer is traveling. 😳
@phomchick - Actually I doubt most cable companies could afford the R&D equipment to define their products improvements.   I suspect most of these guys are small shops.

 Don`t let me ruin the discussion for you folks, but have any of you ever tryed out solid core powercables? (ca 12awg) This might open your ears/eyes a bit (or simply be shocking)




Single strand? I haven’t. My power cables use solid core but with multiple runs of different gauges. I’ve heard people say that large gauge power cable are more bass heavy and small gauge more treble heavy and that the best results come from a power cable that uses multiple gauges. What can you tell us about 12 gauge solid core power cables? Do you get good results?
On another note, I recently bought some adapters and put a high quality power cable upstream of the wall wart power supply that serves my DAC. Wow! The improvement in sound was very impressive. Much more slam and dynamics. I recommend anyone to try this if they are plugging their wall wart start into the outlet.