Power Cable Upgrades (yay or nay)

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Rachel H

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What does anyone think of standard IEC Mains Power Cable upgrades. Does anybody use one, does anybody hear a difference, or at what price point does anybody claim a difference can be heard.

I'd be interested to hear what anyone thinks of high current claims for these cables. Does anybody agree that quality copper windings are an extension of the power transformer within an amplifier for example. Can this improve reliability of the device or have an impact on sound?

How can an expensive power cord improve on what comes through some very cheap wiring running through the home. :confused: Love to hear thoughts on this!

Rach' ;)
 
Nay
 
I think it is important to go back to the original IEC 60320 Appliance couplers for household and similar general purposes standard and actually understand which leads you are talking about. There are 23 different cables that meet the IEC 60320 standard. The C13 (cable plug) - C14 (inlet socket) cables (which is what I believe you are referring to) are the ones that are normally used on electrical appliances such as AV equipment, computers etc.
These are often confused with the C15 -C16 Cables (which have a notch in the plug and are often referred to as kettle leads as they have a higher pin temperature rating but both have the same 10a rating and only the pin temperature varies.
You can pay extra for added prettiness and additional snake oil. I will caveat this by saying that I have seen similar cheap leads with the C13 connector which did not meet the 10a required rating and actually became so hot that they melted during testing.
So to answer your original question I do not believe and have not heard any difference in aftermarket third party C13 cables.
 
Never mind speaker cables, this is going to be contentious.

I'm going to dive in straight away and say that I've heard a power cable make a difference, and it WASN'T down to expectation bias!

Nick :)
 
I've played around with mains leads and I do think a decent pair can make a difference, mainly by not causing interference to your RCA/XLR and speaker cables tucked in behind the same boxes.
I would never say a £2k power cord is worth it's cost but a decent shielded £75 cable might be worth investing in to "clean up" behind your hifi stack.

I picked up a few cheap shielded cables with good connectors on eBay for under £70-90 each (make sure you get UK plugs though as most come with standard mainland Europe prongs).
 
Never mind speaker cables, this is going to be contentious

I'm going to dive in straight away and say that I've heard a power cable make a difference, and it WASN'T down to expectation bias!

Nick :)

Thats' hilarious, I was actually going to start the thread with the words; 'who's up for a fight', but thought better of it. :p
 
Give it a rest.

Thanks for the very useful input, Happy!

It's a hugely debated subject, it's gonna cause some friction but I want to hear what some of the regulars around here think.

You don't like the thread then shoo! o_O
 
I'm currently (no pun) using 2.5mm twin and earth as speaker cable for my 3 fronts if that counts? It sounds positively (no pun) wonderful :thumbsup:
 
Never mind speaker cables, this is going to be contentious.

I'm going to dive in straight away and say that I've heard a power cable make a difference, and it WASN'T down to expectation bias!

Nick :)
A colleague of mine, a felliw electronic engineer who was deeply into Ham radio and had the luxury of building his house, insisted that call the internal mains wiring would be in earthed metal conduit. Now with 100w RF transmissions and potential arcing between conductors, that was prudent.
Similarly I recall working on a rural house some 5 miles along a single phase spur and measuring 15 volts AC between earth and neutral.
These were extreme situations
Mains born interference is real ,and if one was adjacent to the london underground electric railway, a flat beside the lift or the local arc welding shop it would really matter.
When I was engaged in research, we ran all our front end electronics from a collection of 24 v truck batteries, and switched off the experiment as we switched over.. one set on charge one in use.
A company I worked with insisted in having saturable reactor mains voltage stabilizer fitted on the machines we built. They were going into hospitals, so dirty maind was likely.
Would , Could does it matter with hi fi. ? Yes , but very little that a bit of mains conditioning will not take care of.
Where the conditioning is situated .. it can be in the device, the cable or in the distribution box.

There is an onus on the designers of electronic equipment that their equipment will not affect or be affected by injecting or being subject to mains born interference. For a product sold in the EU it is implied by having a CE marking and goes by the title the EMC directive. If equipment sold within the EU does not conform, the importer is liable.
 
Yeah and been done to death here.

Awww, I searched that big time, didn't come up in any of my searches here. Now you made me pout. :(

I'll try again, cos there are people around here who's input I respect and I really really wanna know!:)

And just so we're clear it has nothing to do with my amp pulling another moody and blowing a fuse...nothing!..nothing, you hear! :confused:
 
Unfortunately, what I can't do is say what makes a good power cable, other than what makes good speaker cable - which is lots of copper. Any old copper, really.

What I did with some audiophile friends thirty years ago was compare a stock power cable with one we had made up with single core mains installation cable. Solid core speaker cables were all the rage then, and we'd thought we'd try it in a power cable, just for fun.

We had all just completed our physics and electronics degrees, and thought we knew everything about electronics. Because of the way amplifiers worked, we just knew that different power cables couldn't make any difference to sound quality. So we compared two different power cables to prove our theory, and show that the snake oil salesmen were frauds.

The solid core cable sounded worse than the stock cable, and we were stunned. Moreover, it was different in a very particular (and quite unpredictable) way, and we all heard the same thing. Over and over again. It completely pulled the rug from under our smug feet, and I've been trying to explain it to this day.

So whenever I hear someone saying that power cables can't possibly make any difference (which is a lot) it makes me think - yeah - well, I thought that, too.

Nick
 
Better tell the house electricians to install hifi power cables in the walls instead of standard ones in case someone who buys said house wants ta listen to some toons
 
I've got them really expensive ones. Tell you what though the Unicorn the courier was riding was a beautiful animal. A very rare thing happened, the Unicorn crapped on my lawn. I picked up the poop and put in on my tomatoes. You want to see the size of the toms now, huge, like footballs and the taste, oh the taste.

The cables were rubbish mind!
 
I'm not gonna say if they make any difference, maybe they do maybe they don't. What I will say is when I sold my MA Sliver range speakers and bought Gold range for a few hundred quid more there was a night and day improvement. Big smile on my face whenever I played any music, everything sound like it had been nicely remixed or remastered. When I stripped out all of my Russ Andrews and similar power chords, fancy power blocks etc, well over a grands worth at RRP, I didn't notice any obvious difference at all so flogged off the lot of them. If there's really nowhere you can go in terms of upgrading your system and you have money burning a hole in your pocket then try for yourself but if there's any other upgrade routes available to you then you should probably look there first!
 
I reckon that unless you're an out and out audiophile you will not notice any difference unless you have what used to be referred to as "dirty mains" and may still be, although I haven't heard that term used for a long time. I'm sure there are lots of other things you could do to improve things like e.g. Timmy C describes in the previous post.

My tuppence worth anyway. :)

Martin.
 
Snake oil. Next.
 
Ever tried listening to them? I thought it was the worst form of snake oil, too, until I tried it for myself. Then I was embarrassed to realise that I didn't know everything.

Everyone thought the world was flat because no-one had sailed round it.

Nick
 
So long as the cables are correctly rated for the job in hand, NO, there will not be any difference, however if you have poor quality interconnects (Most fancy cables are just cheap cables with a fancy name) then they may pick up interference from the mains cable, (Hence the reason you should always cross them at 90 degrees) which a screened mains cable will fix, but you should really buy some decent interconnects as they don’t cost much.

Dirty mains can be a problem in some instances, however a surge protected (NOT conditioned) mains strip should solve the problem. (NOTE: If you have really dirty mains (Very seldom) them its best to go for a mains regenerator)

Bill
 
So the RF crosstalk is interesting. We have just had one of our Aerospace Test Rig Control Panels RF tested for conformance as part of our Declaration of Conformity Testing by a third party Notified Body, fully Faraday cage testing and noisy RF environment testing. The control panel is about £100k of ultra-sensitive feedback measuring equipment for military applications. We use fairly standard C13 - C14 cables supplied by one of the well known electronic component wholesalers for part of the hook-up and there was no measurable RFi either emitted or detected. So make of it what you will, but we certainly don't use Russ-Andrews or similar leads. Now if its not measuring it in a couple of million pounds of RF testing Lab I highly doubt that its detectable in a few grands worth of HiFi (and the amplifiers in our rigs cost as much as a small car).
 
I've played around with mains leads and I do think a decent pair can make a difference, mainly by not causing interference to your RCA/XLR and speaker cables tucked in behind the same boxes.
I would never say a £2k power cord is worth it's cost but a decent shielded £75 cable might be worth investing in to "clean up" behind your hifi stack.

I picked up a few cheap shielded cables with good connectors on eBay for under £70-90 each (make sure you get UK plugs though as most come with standard mainland Europe prongs).

I’m of very much the same opinion. I use eBay buys and have seen improvement across multiple devices.

In sprawling HiFi and Av systems you have lots of wires in close proximity. So, power shielding seems to help. Remember the inverse square rule for EM radiation, so distance is your friend.

In principle it’s best to segregate power from signal cables as far as practicable. I have my signal cables in trunking on top of the deep old skirting boards and power cables on the floor. But, at some point they all come together. So, shielding comes in.

The effect of mains conditioning and shielded power cables seems to be better clarity across the range in sound and a better AV signal.

My biggest surprise was adding a Audioquest NRG1 (£30 off eBay) to my Apple TV 4K. Better colours and closed up the sound gap to discs.

Simple mains filters also seem to work on my electricity... However, my house wiring is old and interesting...

Like all things, it depends on your listening situation and, if your kit/budget warrants expenditure in this region.
 
I’m of very much the same opinion. I use eBay buys and have seen improvement across multiple devices.

In sprawling HiFi and Av systems you have lots of wires in close proximity. So, power shielding seems to help. Remember the inverse square rule for EM radiation, so distance is your friend.

In principle it’s best to segregate power from signal cables as far as practicable. I have my signal cables in trunking on top of the deep old skirting boards and power cables on the floor. But, at some point they all come together. So, shielding comes in.

The effect of mains conditioning and shielded power cables seems to be better clarity across the range in sound and a better AV signal.

My biggest surprise was adding a Audioquest NRG1 (£30 off eBay) to my Apple TV 4K. Better colours and closed up the sound gap to discs.

Simple mains filters also seem to work on my electricity... However, my house wiring is old and interesting...

Like all things, it depends on your listening situation and, if your kit/budget warrants expenditure in this region.

Why does multi-thousand pound H-Fi/AV equipment come with a standard IEC cable and not a £200 cable in the box if they make a difference? (An extra £200 to the price would only be loose change)

Bill
 
What does anyone think of standard IEC Mains Power Cable upgrades. ...

Rach' ;)

It depends on what you mean by "upgrade". Do you have a specific cable in mind, and can you provide a link to the cable?

In nice round numbers, a 100w/ch amp can have 45v applied to the Amps and consume about 5 amps at the speaker terminals. But that passed through a step down transformer in the power supply. So working backwards, that 45v and 5 amps on the speaker terminals is 240v and 0.9375 amps at the electrical outlet. That is the peak current for a full 200 watts from a 100w/ch amp sustaining full power. Likely in common use, the current is more like 0.042 amps.

So a common 14ga Power Cable, which peaks at about 20 amp, but typically has a 15 amps rating in an external plug-in cord, is only commonly using about 0.28% of its capacity.

Many fancy Power Cords are shield, 1 meter of shielded cable is of limited value when it is connected to miles of unshielded Power Grid.

Now you are free to want some nice fancy LOOKING Cables, that is certainly your choice, but know that appearance is all that you are buying.

Yes, there are certainly a group of people who claim that Fancy Power Cords can effect the sound quality. Unfortunately none of them can come up with a logical explanation as to why. Most amps and other similar products have heavily Regulated Power Supplies, and that assures the final Power Supply Voltage is fixed and stable within a very wide range of power demands.

In fact, it would not be uncommon for a 200w (100w/ch) Stereo Amp to actually have a 300w Power Supply, so it has considerable reserves.

As mentioned by someone else, in worst case scenarios, it is possible for the Electrical Grid Voltage to be low, or other aspects like noise to come into play, but a Power Cable can not effect any of these things.

Yes, you are right to want a good quality, nice looking, durable cable, but that can be done for very modest money. And I suspect if equipment manufacturers were not supplying adequate Power Cords with their systems, Health and Safety would shut them down pretty quickly.

Yes, a new Power Cord does make some limited sense ... up to a point... but understand what you are getting and why.

Steve/bluewizard
 
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