How can power cords make a difference?

I could give you lots of reasons for why they shouldn't make any difference.

Albert - There is literally no conceivable reason why your Sony DVD player should benefit from a 12 gauge line cord. If your Purist cord does improve the sound it is because of some phenomenon outside the known laws of science. It is very similar to someone claiming that their car runs better when the gas is pumped thru certain brands of pump nozzels.

Albert - Since I don't know all the laws of science, it's more than a little presumptious of me to claim that an effect must be outside all known laws. So, sticking to the few laws I do know I checked the resistance and voltage drop of 18 vs. 12 gauge line cord. I know claims are made that there are other effects of some kind that are more important. Anyway, I thought you might find these numbers interesting as they help keep things in perspective.

Assuming that your DVD draws about 10 watts, a 6 ft 12 gauge cord will drop .0016 volts while the stock 18 gauge cord will drop .006 volts. Now, it is typical for your utility voltage to vary 10 volts during different times of the day. Also, good gear is design to handle two or three times that amount without any problems. So, the voltage stability provided by the larger line cord is somewhere around 1 to 2 thousand times smaller than the normal variations of the utility's voltage.

I picked my analogy of the pump nozzle effecting the performance of the car because it is similar. Electricity is pumped to your power supply where it is transformed, rectified and stored for (by electrical time standards) later use. Much like the gas from the service station pump doesn't flow into the engine, the electricity from the line cord doesn't flow into the digital/audio circuitry.

It is this tremendous isolation between what is happening at the line cord (330 peak to peak volts) and what is happening at the circuitry level (low nearly perfectly regulated dc voltages) that make it incomprhensible that the minute contributions of exotic lines are significant.

Frap and Dekay - The system distortion has to have something to do with the ability to hear the contribution of line cord doesn't it? I mean, if you put a killer line cord on a boom box, would that gain you something? Maybe I have it upside down. I used to manufacture power inverters. Most of them put out a modified squarewave - lots of harmonics. Cheap equipment would buzz. Good gear sounded OK.

Doug - Makes sense to me. Nothing wrong with well put together line cords.

Albert - This isn't personal. I like talking about hifi related things. I don't get upset if someone says that their line cord makes a huge difference. I find it interesting. I don't judge people by whether they use expensive line cords or not. I have friends with whom I disagree about important things. Like you, I am just expressing my opinion. I don't like fighting and I take care not to write anything that sounds personal. I state an opinion and try to back it up with some information. I thought you might find the line cord voltage numbers interesting. It wasn't written with the intent to agravating you or with the expectation that you were going to read it and cry out "MY GOD, how could I have been so wrong!?"... And, I'm sure that if I had a chance to hear your system I would agree that it sounded damn good.

Doug - I don't have any fancy line cords. I will try the following experiment. I do have a 100 foot very ordinary extention cord. I have heard people report that even changing a 6 ft cord to a 3 ft cord made a difference. So, I will run my system thru 100 ft of cheap cord and see what happens.

I suspect that if I hear a difference people here will belive me. If I don't hear a difference people will assume that my system is bad or my hearing is bad or that after 6 ft of cheap line cord it can't get any worse.

Which brings up a question. Just how low does the distorion of ones system have to be before it becomes possible to hear the additional problems caused by cheap line cords.

And, science is what makes the marvelous equipment we have possible. Scientists and engineers understand and design amplifiers, preamps, digital and analogy recording and play back technology. Non-scientists make line cords and speaker wire and can't explain how even they work.

J.D. - Your logic about the development of audio is odd. If I understand what you are saying, electronics and acoustics did not exist before advances in audio were made. Theil and Small, for example, made their contributions before the existence of loudspeakers? And they did it by dusting off their high school math books and doing a little figuring. You honestly believe that scientific and engineering ability have only played a minor role in the advancement of audio?

More importantly your post to 702 is rude. It is a personal attack. You deserve a good spanking. It is also poorly constructed. You say,"I understand you have this image of yourself as a great mind in audio". Can you justifiy this statement? You clearly resent that he tries to pass some of the simpler things he understands along, but that does not imply that he thinks he is a great mind in audio. You are just being insulting. Then you say "you have no right to claim your knowledge in home audio brings you any closer to an understanding of components performance than I or others here at AudiogoN do." First, he doesn't say this. Second, if he did, you now need to explain why someone trained in electronics would not have the right to claim more understanding of electronic components than those without training. Your justification for saying this is that YOU have the right to claim to know more because of 40 years of "experience". You accuse him of arrogance and then suggest you are the one who knows the most. "Your delusions of grandeur", do you really believe that he has delusions of grandeur or are you just being deliberately offensive? Now you switch to goobledygook. The meaningless term "reality of audio reproduction" is supposed to be more significant than theory. Did you mean "music" but wanted something that sounded fancy? You finish off with an insult ("come down off your throne"), some nonsense (your ideas are only ideas with not practical application), sarcasm ("Thank you for your attempt to teach us") and some arrogance (he should learn from people who think like you).