One Cord To Rule Them All

You want to get power from the wall to the regenerator over a distance of 5 feet?  And you want to push 600 watts (5A at nominal voltage).  How would you spend more than a couple of dollars doing that?  Standard household power cable does that all day long.  Nothing is going to change between the wall and the regenerator.  It is the PSA 10's job and raison d'être to eliminate line noise, waveform fluctuation and feed perfect sine wave power to your equipment.  Spending hundreds of dollars for a "cable" to bring it power makes no sense whatsoever.

@OP - By all means, experiment to your heart's content.  I'm all for trying things out.  As you may have noticed, I am skeptical of power cord improvements, especially to a component that is itself designed to improve the power quality.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no dearth of silly advice.

One poster suggested a 7 or 9 gauge cable from the wall.  That cable can't carry more current that whatever is in the wall, so using any larger gauge than your household Romex is like connecting a firehose to a garden hose.  The firehose can't put out more than the garden hose can deliver to it.

Someone else suggested hospital grade cable.  The hospital grade refers to physical characteristics unrelated to the current such as resistance to flexing, strain relief, connector strength, impact resistance and so on.  Nothing at all to do with current.  In fact, most hospital grade cable is 16 or 18 gauge.  See here:  https://www.cablestogo.com/learning/library/standards-specs-certs/hospital-grade-power-cords

Good luck in your quest and let us know the results.

@thyname
Dude, if you have access to a cable lending library, experiment away!!  I wish I could do that.  As Don von Recklinghausen once said, "If it measures bad and sounds good, it's good.  If it measures good and sounds bad, you're measuring the wrong thing."

Many apologies; I got the quote wrong.  He said, "If it measures good and sounds bad, it's bad.  If it measures bad and sounds good, you're measuring the wrong thing."

Recklinghausen was the chief engineer for HH Scott back in the day.  His long of audio accomplishments is here:  http://hhscott.com/vonrecklinghausen.htm

@thyname

Oh, boy.  Someone needs to take a few deep breaths and recite some mantras; I clearly pushed a button which apparently turned off their brain and made them forget what was being discussed.

The OP asked for advice regarding a 5ft power for a very expensive power quality device that acts something like a UPS without the battery backup component.  It converts the power to DC then back to AC, and puts AC at nominal, with a perfect sine wave and without power quality distortions such as voltage fluctuation.  Furthermore, the OP specifically mentioned the criterion that it be able to handle 600W continuous.  

Someone else wrote that a 7 or 9 gauge cable would be sufficient.  All I said was that the 5’ 7 or 9 gauge cable is not going to have any noticeable impact on current delivery.  C-u-r-r-e-n-t d-e-l-i-v-e-r-y.  I spelled it out since using all the letters together didn’t work the first time. 

Notice please that we are NOT talking about audio components.  We’re talking about current to a power regenerator.  That is the thing, you know, that fixes all the power problems, or at least the voltage-related ones (sag, swell, transients) and waveform distortion, i.e., harmonic distortion.  I would just posit that if such a component were itself to have its performance lessened by waveform distortion and/or voltage fluctuation then we need to have a completely different discussion about PS Audio and its technology.

Consequently, none of the subsequent litany of “misconceptions” is in any way relevant to what I posted.

As for Caelin Gabriel, I read the DTCD Measures Up” paper.  Really interesting and I recommend it; it’s provided good food for thought.  And what’s even more interesting is that he lives in the same tiny town (Poulsbo) as my former boss.  Their two companies were in the same industrial park!  I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew each other, having both worked with the Navy and being in similar fields.

Anyway, in this paper he talks about the how different power cords deliver and respond to a transient burst of current over very short periods of time (50 microseconds).  A cycle is 1/60 of a second,  the equivalent of more than 330 of these small bursts.  He is trying to simulate the way that power supplies draw current in very quick pulses.  To this end he has developed a measuring device called a DTCD (dynamic transient current delivery) Analyzer.  He takes lots of interesting measurements showing the differences that cable size and type, as well as connectors, can make over a short (3') length of cable.  He claims to be able to measure a difference if the cable length is changed even just an inch.

It’s a very well written interview by Michael Fremer, and what CG says makes sense.  It’s all about current delivery - a LOT of current delivery - over tiny intervals.  In his graphs he’s measuring instantaneous current peaks of up to 300A.  Remember that a standard residential service in the U.S. is 200A total.  300A is a crapload of current.  The OP’s 600 watts is just 5A at nominal voltage.  A typical 20A circuit breaker can handle a current peak of 125% before it trips. 

 I have to wonder what a realistic instantaneous current draw is for a piece of audio equipment.  And I admit that I don’t fully grasp the significance of such short interval current draw.  Caelin talks about switched mode power supplies (SMPS) and full wave bridge rectifiers.  SMPS use pulse-width modulation (PWM) to regulate the voltage in intervals of a cycle.  PWM is used in amplifies, dimmers, and all kinds of controls systems where changing the voltage regulates some kind of output.  But even a 1% interval in a cycle (which is very small) is still more than three times larger than the entire 50 microsecond interval that CG is graphing with his cool device.  

I just don’t know enough about the intervals that amps draw current at to draw theoretical conclusions about an associated impact on sound.  The fastest amplifier I’ve ever read about is the Sansui AU-X1, which has a rise time (the time it takes the waveform to get from 10% to 90%of its final value) of 0.5 microseconds - an order of magnitude below what CG is measuring, and a slew rate (rate of change or slope of the signal waveform) of 260V/microsecond.  The Krell Evolution (just to pick something completely randomly) has a slew rate of 120V/microsecond.  Rise time isn’t published.

This leaves me with lots to think about.  But I still don’t see how an expensive power cable is going to make any difference to what comes out of a well-designed, high end power regenerator like the PS Audio.  

Millercarbon

I am in Seattle and I greatly appreciate your kind offer to hear your system.  I am sure it better than mine, as I am still working on the room to set it up in.  Will PM you with contact info.

I am simply saying that worrying about the power cord for a product whose purpose is to improve the power quality implies a lack faith in that product's ability to do its job.  

And I'm sorry, but I don't see any logic in your statement. You talk about a ripple or artifact from the original power source (the utility I presume) being carried through the AC/DC and DC/AC conversion unless you disconnect AC power and run it on a battery alone.  That's just not true.  A voltage regulator in the circuit will eliminate ripple current.  I am sure the PS Audio device has something like that.  This could be easily determined by testing the regenerator on a O-Scope.  In any case, no power cord is going to eliminate ripple current.

@millercarbon
Following your logic, perhaps the OP should buy another regenerator to deliver power to his other regenerator.  Heck, maybe shove a third one in there, just to be safe.

@Glupson
Fortunately, though I care deeply about many things, being labeled a "cable hater" is not one.  I am capable of performing a double blind listening test, when I care to. I could also run a couple tests if I had an O-Scope.  I also don't/won't care if someone thinks I didn't do it right, just as I'm certain they won't care if tell them that electrical/electronic component burn in used to detect early failures due to manufacturing faults, was undoubtedly conducted before the component got in their hands, and is unlikely to change any performance metric of said component.

That said, I will never tell someone what they heard (or didn't) because I can't experience something the way they do.  And also because I have met people whose hearing skill is far more refined than mine.  I can usually tell when something's "off" but I won't be able to say what; but I know people can make a few adjustments here and there and voila!, the music sounds 100% better because their hearing so well trained.  I will treat skeptically claims by people I don't know who haven't done a real blind test.

I was actually impressed with the CG interview.  Sure, Shunyata wants to sell their stuff - and it's not cheap - but he was doing real research.  Now whether any of it provides an audible improvement, I can't say.

If I ever get around to really playing with cables I definitely post any results here.  But I can assure you that I won't start with power cables because I would expect greater improvements from speaker cables, then interconnects.