Phil Leigh;639262 Wrote: > There's NOTHING crazy about having 3,000 CD's. There's plenty crazy > about a $1,000 mains cord...
My take on the power cord issue is that power cords CAN make a difference in sound, some times fairly significant changes, but it doesn't take thousands of dollars to do it well. People selling $1000 cords may very well have a cord which sounds better than many other cords, but thats probably NOT caused by whatever cost the $1000 but by some coincidental factor. The issue here is that what makes a cord sound good is not well understood, there are many theories out there as to what is happening. What usually happens is that someone came up with a hypothesis along the lines of "super high purity metal might be a factor", so they build a cord with very high purity metal, and low and behold it DOES sound better. Well if that sounded better then ultra super high purity metal should sound even better, right? But in reality the improvement in the original had nothing to do with the metal but was caused by the particular insullation used which was required to maintain the metal purity during manufacfture. If that same insullation was used with lesser purity metal you would get similar sound improvements for a lot less money, but nobody makes such a combination because the slightly more expensive insullation is only used with the high purity metal, thus nobody actually tries that insullation with cheaper metal. This sort of thing is rampant in the industry. Someone comes up with something that does improve sound, then goes crazy and spends a huge amount of money getting that one paramter to its absolute pinicale of perfection, not realizing that the original improvement was caused by something else! Do I buy $1000 cords? No way, I build my own cords. The most expensive one I have made is about $35. My power cords do sound different from each other, I'm exploring different geometries, insullations, shielding etc using relatively inexpensive materials. And its not just listening, I can actually measure differences caused by the different cords. One interesting finding from this is that different gear sounds better with different cords, that REALLY complicates things! There is still a lot more work to come up with decent correlations as to what cord type sounds best with what equipment. Even if I did have good correlations it wouldn't do any good unless you make your own, since most manufacturers won't aqctually tell you how their cords are made and exactly what materials are used. The best advice I can give right now given the state of the market place is to buy several different inexpensive cords from different manufacturers and try them out on different equipment in your system. If it doesn't make any difference you are not out a lot of money. On the other hand you just might find a combination that DOES improve the sound of your system. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88364 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
