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Why Power Cables Affect Sound

I just bought a new CD player and was underwhelmed with it compared to my cheaper, lower quality CD player. That’s when it hit me that my cheaper CD player is using an upgraded power cable. When I put an upgraded power cable on my new CD player, the sound was instantly transformed: the treble was tamed, the music was more dynamic and lifelike, and overall more musical. 

This got me thinking as to how in the world a power cable can affect sound. I want to hear all of your ideas. Here’s one of my ideas:

I have heard from many sources that a good power cable is made of multiple gauge conductors from large gauge to small gauge. The electrons in a power cable are like a train with each electron acting as a train car. When a treble note is played, for example, the small gauge wires can react quickly because that “train” has much less mass than a large gauge conductor. If you only had one large gauge conductor, you would need to accelerate a very large train for a small, quick treble note, and this leads to poor dynamics. A similar analogy might be water in a pipe. A small pipe can react much quicker to higher frequencies than a large pipe due to the decreased mass/momentum of the water in the pipe. 

That’s one of my ideas. Now I want to hear your thoughts and have a general discussion of why power cables matter. 

If you don’t think power cables matter at all, please refrain from derailing the conversation with antagonism. There a time and place for that but not in this thread please. 
mkgus

Showing 2 responses by swanlee597

swanlee597
9 posts
 
I always find the people that say nothing makes a difference as bad as the green pen/snake oil crowd. I remember before Jitter was identified and measurable people thought those of us that had issues with CD's were nuts.

I’ve clearly heard differences in all sorts of cables over 30 years of being in audio. Just because you may not have or year read about some ABX test doesn’t mean others haven’t heard it.
swanlee597
9 posts
 
I don't get some of the arguments here? So because street lines and breaker boxes have noise issues then we "SHOULDN’T" bother with better power cables? That makes no sense in fact that makes the argument that yes we should invest in better cables and line conditioners cause normally the quality of the equipment sending us electricity is usually not that great.

We have control over the last hop into our audio electronics not the rest of the Electric infrastructure so we should try and improve the parts we can.
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