I will just throw this into the mix. If you take a look at the box that contains your circuit breakers for the house you will probably find that all the lines that run through your house have 12 gauge copper wire. So explain to me why anyone would think that they need 10 gauge or thicker running the last couple of feet from the plug to the amplifier.
Why do I need power management if I have a great power cord?
Isn't it kind of unnecessary to additionally add a power conditioner if I have an expensive audio file grade Power cord connected to a component?
So you buy a Power conditioner from a hi-fi store and they say oh, you need a really good power cord to go with that and then another one to go from conditioner to the component. Do you need it all and why? Seems the last couple of feet before the component should be more than enough.
Showing 7 responses by bruce19
@ghdprentice "High end audio is a very complex endeavor… full of ambiguity and complexity." Well said. The problem is not "trying to prove a negative," as someone else said, the problem is to hear something that one does not yet know how to hear. Hearing is mostly interpretation and only partly physical. One needs to know what to listen for. I think of the days before OLED TV’s. People would say, "This IS a black background." Then, much blacker blacks came along and people could now see that they had been missing something. And it was not just the blacks. It was everything on the screen. Everything gets better -- and the whole experience gets better. So, the first reaction -- "This is just 'up-selling' or 'snake oil' -- turns out to be wrong. What folks came to learn was that quieting visual noise (making backgrounds blacker) changes the foreground by changing the background. That is very hard for people to understand, because they are focused -- almost exclusively -- on what is in the foreground. The fundamental mistake they make is to disconnect foreground and background. They are entangled for both perception and conception. @mahgister makes this point very well when he tries to direct attention to the room's acoustics. But his point applies very well to the technological devices' designs and their power sources, too. This point about the "blacker background" applies pari passu to other things besides background noise; the way highs, mids, bass registers are expressed by speakers, the way transients and dynamics are shaped. And the technologies that make all these areas better are often not easy to grok, which is why your suggestions of resources like Robert Harley is so appropriate.
I think you have nicely put your finger on a key aspect of the hifi pursuit. As you say we need to learn (train our ears) to find the some imperfections once we get beyond a certain level. So my observation is that a blacker background on a tv does not make the programming better or worse. However if you focus on the blackness of the background you can make yourself unhappy with your equipment. Is that a smart thing to do? Does this all come down to the old saw about whether we want to listen to the music or the equipment? The brain is very, very good at filtering. It can filter all kinds of distractions if we allow it to. But some are too distracting. For instance I really dislike the surface noise that comes with many LPs, so for me digital sources are preferred. Is there such a thing as 'optimal stopping' in audio? I think so.
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I've been trying to understand what you are saying. But first of all, respectfully, I think the relationship of the size of conductor to resistance involves a square and a determination of output impedance is more complicated that just being the product of LCR. I am not an EE so I struggle like many others with the complexity of electrical circuits. But it sounds to me like you are saying that the benefit of a short, fat wire (a bespoke power cable) connected to a long thin wire (the household romex) carrying AC current is that it acts kind of like a capacitor in that it stores up current as a reserve in instances when the amp needs more. My problem with this vision is that in an amp's power supply the AC is converted to DC and if the amp has a linear power supply built into it (and here I am thinking of a solid state class A amp, in fact I am specifically thinking of a Pass Firstwatt F6 which I am currently building) then it includes a generous bank of capacitors and resistors specifically to smooth out the dc current after it has passed though the rectifier that converts it from the AC into DC. I believe that same capacitor bank also acts as the current reserve for the amp. I suspect this reserve is much, much larger that what could be conceivably stored in a 3 or 6 foot length of power cable. So it seems to me that either I am mistaken or you are mistaken about how this all works. I tried searching for a more definitive answer on the net but I suspect I just did not know how to phrase the "fat wire, thin wire" question correctly. For what it's worth, I don't know if you have ever had the chance to look inside an amp, but the wires carrying the current as well as the outgoing signal are pretty thin. Also while reading up for this amp building project I recall Nelson Pass, a man for whom I have great respect, making a comment regarding wires to the effect that he has nothing against nice wires and if people give them to him he uses them but beyond that he seemed not too concerned.
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