What was the first power cable that you noticed a difference in the sound?
I have bought six or seven different power cords, none over $500 and have noticed little or no change in the sound of my system. All the cables are 12 gauge or bigger. Without talking about cables made with unobtainium, where did you start hear a difference.
Thanks.
What I find really interesting is the number of times the subject of power cables comes up, and the response the subject seems to get every time. This post is already on page 4. And before someone points out that "you're reading it", yes I am because I'm always looking to find something new, but in the case of PCs it looks like there really is no new ground to cover. Still, this is one subject that just gains traction every time the same question is raised. Not sure what that says about us? (me included) . |
My demonstrations for the following cables were performed in a local dealers showrooms. Since then I have owned and auditioned many different power cables. My first experience was with Shunyata Research’s Black Momba power cable demonstrated on a Naim Audio Classic series seperates system. The Momba was powering the amplifier driving Thiel speakers. My second experience was the Nordost Vahalla powering an Ayre Acoustic Ax-5 integrated amplifier driving Aerial 7T’ speakers. In my system aftermarket power cables along with Synergistic Research Purple fuses considerably enhances the performance. ymmv N |
@curiousjim "I have bought six or seven different power cords, none over $500 and have noticed little or no change in the sound of my system" correct! good quality equipment must supply sufficient power cable, some brands like Esoteric have “upgraded” power cable option available for extra charge. if someone can “hear” sound improvement after replacing power cable, before claiming power cable problem I would in details, for example what cable was replaced, outlet degradation issues etc. In many cases de-ox spray fixes contact issues, w/o changing need to replace cable. |
I never expected power cords made a difference. Then I got a used 2M Audio Art Power I Classic cable, used with a big class D amp. Immediately heard subtle but worthwhile differences. Got a 2nd one of these (1.5M) and put it on a tubed headphone amp. Heard a slight but worthwhile difference. These are budget cables, bottom of the line in Audio Arts lineup, but they made a positive difference for me. |
@sudnh , I have a Hegel H390 going to KEF Reference 5 speakers by way of either AQ Rocket 88 cables or Audio Art’s Statement E cables with the lockable Rhodium bananas. |
It was the Shunyata Delta NR. Frankly, I was shocked over how a cable could make that much of a difference. But I did not like all of the changes (enhanced mids but at the cost of toning down the highs, i.e. less bright), but changing the fuse to a Rhodium fuse and then again to a Synergistic Purple fuse addressed that! |
@riccitone |
You don’t mention what you have for equipment. I recently did the same and borrowed 5 different power cables in the $300 range. on my mid-level high end system I heard differences for each cable. the winner then was Pangea 14XL with Cardas copper. recently someone Facebook turned me on to Ataudio power cables from aliexpress here a $60 cable bettered the Pangea 14XL .
so dunno what you have for an audio system or what type of music you listen to but if you hear no differences than you will at least save $$.
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@carlsbad2 Jerry, intuitively it makes sense that the low power requirements of DAC's & Streamers wouldn't benefit by upgraded power cables, but my experience proved otherwise. I had my Shunyata dealer send me 3 Shunyata power cables, including the lower priced Alpha v2 NR, the medium-priced Sigma v2 NR and the higher priced Omega QR-s. All 3 power cables were burned in for a minimum of 250 hours. Of all of my equipment that includes a Gryphon Antileon EVO amp, Gryphon Pandora pre-amp and dCS Rossini Apex DAC / Streamer, I heard noticeable SQ improvements with the highest-end Omega QR-s power cable connected to my dCS DAC / Streamer, which I wasn't expecting. Furthermore, you would think that the massive Class A Gryphon Antileon EVO amp would also benefit by the QR-s cable, but I heard no noticeable difference between the highest end Omega QR-s cable vs. the medium-priced Sigma v2 NR power cable. This seems to suggest that you need to ignore any assumptions and field test various options to find the best overall system synergies. |
I have no dispute with the methods used by some to gather their info and conclude their investigations. If one chooses the route of discussions being had, or reading about PC Triple C Wire used as the Signal Path in a Cable, that is their choice. What I do have at my end which is at least one stage further on as an investigation is the experiencing the Wire in use in my Home System, with the outcome being that I have exchanged nearly all Cables and the Wire PC Triple C is now the most common Wire in use, where it has superseded the use of OCC Copper and Silver. The PC Triple C Wire is not the chosen Wire for the Digital Source, after further investigations and extending this to being an experience. The Cable used has D.U.C.C as the Signal Wire used between CDT>DAC and is the umbilical type I regularly offer as a suggestion to others. Additionally, all Cables I am using are not assessed from my own experiences, as a social individual within HiFi, there are Demo's and Loans made of owned Cables to be used in other systems. I have also received feedback from adopters of PC Triple C Wire within this Forum Threads, where it has been made known something was present that was an added attraction over the previously used OCC Wire. I am yet to be confronted with anybody suggesting the use of PC Triple C in place of OCC has been a experience where some sort of betterment has not been perceived, when the PC Triple C Wire has been used for the Signal Path or Power Supply. As stated before, I attempt to step around adopting any attitudes shown from myself, where the forming a evaluation without a direct experience is the intention. I avoid if possible any attitude that can relate to the following: "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation." |
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Some disappointment expressed here with Pangea power cables. I have used and built a lot of PCs. The best low cost bargain I have found recently in an assembled cable is the Audiomeca P-90 OCC power cord single crystal copper hifi power cable. You can get it for a little over $100 from Aliexpress. China, I know, but it is super well made and it’s performance beats some of the cables I’ve built with parts costing five times that much. Not much to lose in trying it. kn |
My first experience with upgraded AC cables was with the Synergistic AC Master Couplers in the nineties. I use a full SR loom in my $100k system, many purchased used as others upgrade. They continue to innovate. I'm extremely happy with their offerings, especially at the more entry level. Very high value if you have a sufficiently resolving system... |
@hickamore It definitely made a positive improvement compared to using only one power bar for my setup. I had purchased the Chang Lightspeed with the intent to upgrade from my original Furman. I tried bringing everything over to my newly acquired power bar, which did make a nice difference. But then I’d remembered other threads where this was mentioned and put just my digital components on the Furman. Everything was even better. |
@knownothing Bingo. You nailed it. Comparison on your own equipment with other good equipment and good power cables. When done as you did, the difference is truly not subtle. I didn’t believe it until I did it myself after my equipment had improved to a reasonable level. |
I found this to be helpful to understand the pros and cons of AC wiring: Integrating Electronic Equipment and Power into Rack Enclosures Optimized Power Distribution and Grounding for Audio, Video and Electronic Systems See below page 11-13 for different types of AC power wiring. Good luck with your new room! 😎 Mike |
When I went to buy my first aftermarket cable I dragged my Cambridge Audio Azur 640C V2 CD player into a dealer and he let me connect it to a very high quality Simaudio Moon/Dynaudio system with all Shunyata cables and he let me switch out different power cables to see which worked best with my gear. Maybe it was because the accompanying gear was very good, but the differences were not subtle. Here is what I found: Shunyata Anaconda > Shuyata Diamondback >> Shunyata entry level cable > 14 guage printer cable I grabbed out of the recycle bin at work. What was surprising was how much better the Diamond back was compared to their $100 cable, and how close it was to the Anaconda in performance. I bought the Diamondback. Now I assemble my own power cables. kn
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first cable that made a difference was Shunyata Alpha. best cables are litz and silver. very soft silver ime. more broadly though why is it that Audigon has more than its fair share of theory based cable deniers? like this is pretty straight forward - borrow a cable from a dealer and listen to it. instead all of these people with science backgrounds wanna type novels? i mean - you have ears - and great american customer service from brick and mortar stores - so go borrow a cable and hear it. you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. either you will get to enjoy better sounding music or you will have empirical evidence to better dispute cable boosters.
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Unfortunately never actually, maybe I thought so initially, but I was skeptical of the placebo effect. I’ve owned Nordost, Pangea, Shunyata, Wireworld. I am currently running aftermarket Cullen cables. They are very well-made, reasonably priced, but I’m not sure if they make an actual sonic difference in my system. |
The first power cord that made a significant improvement for me is the Shunyata Venom V10 NR. To my ears, it sounds best on my DAC. A few years later I purchased a Shunyata Delta V2 NR. Wow, that was an even greater improvement in clarity and realism. I also use Shunyata Venom Digital power cords on my iMac and DDC. Happy listening! |
There is one simple answer to this: If you heard any difference between a standard 12AWG power cable and a $500 Audio-Woo-Woo cable, it was confirmation bias or just delusion. It's such fun talking about this stuff with studio engineers. You know, the guys working in multimillion dollar studios, who record and master the music you buy. They laugh endlessly about the absurdity of audiophilia nonsense. But the exotic power cables gets the most laughs. You'll hear phases like "more money than sense" or "crazy deluded muppets". Virtually everything the audiophilia community is obsessed with defies the laws of physics. Or is of such minuscule consequence that merely moving the speakers a few inches will negate any claimed effect. If you want to spend some money, get an electrician to run you a nice clean 20amp power supply in Romex 10AWG solid from your fuse box to a set of six hospital grade power outlets. You can get the lot from Home Depot. Top it off with a decent breaker like an Eaton 20amp ACFI/GFCI and the. forget about the whole thing. |
The first power cord that I ever made I thought made a bigger difference than an Acrotec 6 nines power cord that I thought didn't make much difference. Based on the pseudoscience (voodoo) of the time, It's braided of 18 gauge stranded wires. I don't remember how many but it was fairly thick. The entire thing was wrapped with strips of bike inner tubes to keep it tight, with the entire thing wrapped with that thick magnetic tape, the kind used in shops, and work areas to hold tools in place with heat shrink on top of that and a blue braided cover and decent plugs. All truly done with nothing special materials. The idea of the magnetic tape at the time was to scatter or lessen outside electrical interference but I guess the braiding process takes care of that and I might have reintroduced noise with the magnetic tape. Honestly, I never paid much attention to stuff (power cords) like that at the time but years later I loaned it to a friend to get his take on them. A month later I went to pick them up and I was their a few hours listening to his system with the power cord attached to his amplifier. As I was leaving he had the standard cord reattached and was playing a live Tony Williams quintet recording I just heard and his drum kit just collapsed to the left speaker. We put the homemade cable back in and within a few minutes back to listening, the soundstage changed most notably Tony's drum kit was spread from the left speaker to the center-left of the stage. Neither of us could figure out why that would happen but it was repeatable. This was really one of the first times I noticed such a big change with cables and a power cord at that. Since that time I paid much more attention to powering my system. |
Nordost Blue Heaven on my Sony surround receiver. I was able to try it for free. I came back a week later and gave the store the money. It transformed my system which I used for music and video. I still own those cables. Blue Heaven is 16 gauge so I would recommend the Red Dawn for it now. I use a Puritan Classic Plus on my Marantz surround processor and a Straightwire Pro Thunder on my NAD M 25- 7 channel amp. I have a separate 2 ch setup that has nice power cables. Probably the first cable you should upgrade even before you start auditioning speaker cables. |
pindac, I just wanted to give you a little update I talked to the person that is distributing acoustic revive and I also read up on triple C, it is no better or worse than OCC single crystal copper all they've done is come at it from a different production angle to produce longer crystals but they do not say anywhere that their crystals are 125 m long like OCC single crystal is so from what I've been reading and researching triple C is not better than OCC single crystal and now Neotech has rectangular OCC single crystal which is even better than the round and Joe who distributes acoustic revive said to me he can see how the rectangular would be even better than the round OCC or the triple C. |
The first power cable that noticed a difference in the sound was a Monsrter PowerLine 300. It made everything sound more open, yet detailed and was a real wow from the standard cable. The same effect was noticed on inexpensive hybrid through All tube McIntosh systems. Since that time I have used Nordost Blue Heaven and LessLoss. All were different and more revealing. I felt dollar for dollar the LessLoss was a better performer for anything under $2,500. |
When I bought my briefly-used Classé Audio SS power amps in the late '80s, the previous owner had already outfitted them with Cardas Quadlink power cables (a lower rung in their hierarchy). At some point I experimented with using some ordinary AC cable, and heard the difference immediately, and went back to using the Cardas. I don't recall the specifics, but generally Cardas cables seem to result in more robust bass that is easily noticeable if the system can reproduce it. My system, with a very fine Classé preamp and Apogee Duetta II ribbon speakers, was/is quite revealing. But I did not hear a difference when recently replacing the power cables on my Bluesound Node streamer or my Denafrips Ares II DAC with low-end Audioquest power cables. So, I guess I'm in the camp that says AC cables make more of a difference with power amps than source components, although I'll admit my sample size is small. The original owner of my Classé Audio gear, a dealer, was very enthusiastic about Cardas wire--not only did he replace the power cables with Cardas, but he replaced internal wiring on various products with Cardas wire. |
@steakster Excellent examples of experts. My background is Military electronics so very familiar with the high level of expertise required in various situations. That world certainly offers lessons applicable to audio. Even in Military applications it is not uncommon to encounter attitudes like - "What's the big deal, it's only wire". Unfortunately, the audio hobby suffers too many armchair experts that think knowing how to spell Engineering, Science, or Physics indicates actual knowledge and wisdom. |
I am satisfied with my contribution to the Thread, especially showing a particular Cable Type using PC Triple C Wire, that has caused quite a positive impression on more that one person. The Wire in use as a result of my loaning Cables, has also caused one well known producer of Cables in the UK to have as the end result of experiencing PC Triple C, the use of it in a Cable supersede their own Cable designs. The Link I put up, clearly shows not too much monies are needed to acquire a length and have the experience for oneself. Pure Copper Connectors will add to the cost of not already owned. I have been inquisitive and like to step around anything that relates to the following. "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which can not fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation." |
The first one was Tiffany brand. I do not see the brand any more. They also made heavy brass binding posts. The Tiffany cord did not make a huge difference. About a year later I bought a Black Mamba power cord from Synergistic. That one made an obvious difference. However, the sound was not right in some ways, like off tone and forward, etc. I traded it in after about 4 months. |
@bigtwin Wrote:
I skipped the wall box completely. I ran the wires directly from the electrical panel and drilling a hole through the floor, ran it up to the back of each amp. Then I terminated each wire with a female IEC plug (WATTGATE 320I IEC 15A AC Power Connector Plug Standard BLACK) and plugged it directly in to the IEC connector in back of each amp...no soldering required no opening up the amp case. Hope that helps! On the MC cable question pls see prior post below page one: Mike
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@ditusa Sounds interesting. The best PC is no PC. So did you open up the amp cases and hard-wire directly from the wall box to the amp internally, or did you skip the wall box completely and run a continuous cable from you main panel directly into each amp? Soldered connections? And why did you choose to use Metal Clad cable within the walls. I can't find anything that suggests a benefit to using MC cable inside residential walls. I'm building a new dedicated listening room in the spring and am open to any ideas that can be incorporated at the time of construction. Cheers. |
@panzrwagn +15 This is my claim to power cord fame! One of the reasons I eliminated the power cords from my mono amps was to eliminate two electrical connection points, the wall plug and power cord male plug. Also, another reason is to remove the question about what power cords sounded best. Running each mono amp directly to it’s dedicated electrical circuit sounds better, in my opinion, then running them with power cords and wall plugs. The rest of my equipment uses 12 AWG 1 foot long power cords. As far as all power cords go I would say keep them short as possible and 14 AWG or lower. FWIW, All four of my dedicated audio lines consist of Galvanized Steel MC Metal Clad Cable 10 AWG in wall wiring. 😎 Mike |
