Effects Of Power Cords On Electrostatic Speakers

Thank you @ghdprentice. This is the best explanation I’ve heard. I will certainly go to the Cardas site right now. This about transparency strikes me because I am planning on investing into a number of AMT-2560 (NEO-10) Planar Ribbon drivers, and so I want their transparency to come through. And I suppose that the same thing also applies to crossover networks - that they’ve also come a long ways since the 1960s when I last looked into them? So much has changed since then it is bewildering. What I got from the time I was a kid was to go with 10 gauge copper wire to avoid impedance, so I’ve just stuck with that ever since, but that was over 55 years ago.

@ricevs   Thank you for insulting me.  Of course I listen.

Listen, not imagine.

I wholeheartedly agree with audioman58, noodlyarm, bellemusique and quite a few others on these points: 1) while there are exceptions (and they are usually at the highest price points, because they have the profit-margin to do it), certainly for commercial speakers (and quite often audio equipment in general), the innards -- capacitors, resistors, wire, etc. -- is very often below par to achieve a cost/price point target. Major gains are possible by upgrading these. 2) cables -- power, speaker wire, interconnects do matter -- the degree can vary, and 3) you can indeed hear real differences. It is not expectation bias, at least in my experience. On average, I critically listen to music probably ~15-20 hrs/week on average, all genres (I do like to do other things, too), have done a lot of A/B testing (on a rare occasion or three even had friends make the changes while I left the room) and you can hear differences. My experience. If your mileage varies, so be it. Live and let live.

An always gratifying maintenance tweak for power cables - spray their blades once in awhile with Deoxit. On my Anticables all copper power cables this is mandatory for sound quality.

@hsbrock

Glad I could say something helpful.

Let me add some detail. The time I had to go out and find warmer cable was when I had AMT and ribbon speakers. They were too, well let’s say, too good, in the upper frequencies. They reproduced the deficiencies in high frequencies of my components really well, producing a very fatiguing and unpleasant experience. I would not worry about loosing that “transparency”. This is why cables and interconnects need to be chosen last. You need your final system…. With all your components that sound absolutely spectacular. Then, you start looking for wire.

I spent well over thirty years with planar speakers (electrostatic, AMT, and ribbon). The magic comes from great midrange and really great high frequency response… the same thing that super tweeters do. It is the harmonics above what you can hear that affects what you can hear. This can be magical, if not quite real. I gave up on them and went to traditional dynamic speakers. I am not suggesting you do this. But, don’t worry about losing the transparency. Get your components perfect… then go looking for wire.