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
we need more of the teleportation thingies...and more pebbles...and magic clocks...then we all are going to believe in the magic of power cords :)
Sucking up RFI/EMI? Interesting. So you’re sayin it’s like a magnet for RFI/EMI? Wait’ll the military finds out about that! OMG! Don’t tell anybody RF/EMI is composed of photons, you know, which don’t have charge.

mzkmxcv
357 posts
01-15-2019 1:23pm 

I can also tell you that pretty much no person can tell the difference between 320Kbps MP3 and CD or higher, as studies have been done in treated rooms with expensive gear, and the confidence ratings were all 40%-60%. However, you may think you can.
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Oh boy! Issue with seems to be not just with the power cords. It runs deeper than that.

Any links to the above statement?

Just curious --- do you listen to music on a clock radio speaker with Alexa?
@thyname

The PowerPoint version is down, but the AES paper is available.

Room: Critical Listening Laboratory of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology

Speakers: B&W 802D ($12,000)

Amp: Classé CA-5200 ($8000, Class-A at lower wattage)

DAC: Grace m906 (>$6000)

The only instance where the confidence rating was above 60% for CD vs 320Kbps is one where it was harder to tell with 256Kbps, and that makes no sense.
Funny that 2009 study is the first that comes up when I googled it, with a broken link.

However, you were persistent enough to find it!

A big sample of a whole 13 people! With a mean age of 27!!?

Their second conclusion was fine, until the last part:

*****Trained listeners cannot discriminate between CD quality and mp3 compression (256-320kb/s),while expert listeners could***

Because they had so few individuals (13) they can't compare results from experts and non-experts. It might take at least 10 times as many individuals before they could make statistically valid observations about that. And they never defined what makes for a trained listener and what makes for an expert trained listener.

Simple statistics.

Besides, with the admittedly nice equipment you listed, are you saying that you cannot differentiate between mp3 and CD?