I have a $1000 power cable on my phono stage....

[JSharp]

Actually I just wanted to reply to something

on the new forums to see if my login was working or not...

but

anyway, the subject of power cords is something that's been done over

and over here. There is at least one way that a power cord

can make a difference in the sound of your system.

The fact that

there is miles and miles of aluminum wiring, going to a (usually cheap)

breaker box, with cheap Romex wiring in the walls, to a $0.98 outlet in

the living room, into which you plug your $$$ power cord is

<strong>*NOT*</strong> (did that work?) the issue.

*** edit - hummm, embedding HTML codes no longer <font color="red">works</font>.

You

have six feet or so of power cord between the outlet and the

component. This six feet of wire is emmersed in a veritable bath

of EMI. If you have digital equipment, you have high frequency

hash saturating the environment within a few feet of your equipment

rack. Every piece of gear you have is, to a greater or lesser

degree, emitting RFI noise that a power cord might pick up. If

you are like me, you have a spaghetti (?spell?) nest of patch cords,

speaker cables, power cords, power strips and Cable TeeVee cables piled

up and intertwined with each other behind the equipment. In this

environment, it is quite possible that some power cables might be

better at rejecting the electrical noise they are subjected to than

other cables. Note that doesn't mean that is costs a bazillion dollars

to design and construct a power cord that is properly shieded. My

point is, it's quite possible for cord A to sound different than cord

B.

I'm quite familiar with the EMI that ends up on power cords since I

design equipment for living that has to be tested for FCC compliance.

But the jump from this -

"In this environment. it's quite

possible that some power cables might be better at rejecting the

electrical noise they are subjected to than other cables."

to this -

"it's quite possible for cord A to sound different

than cord B"

isn't just a small creek you're jumping over.

It's the Grand Canyon. Or the Atlantic Ocean.

For there to be a difference in sound quality, there has to first be a

difference in the cable's ability to shield. IOW, it's ability to

filter any signals other than the 60hz power line it's connected to.

Then that difference has to pass through the filtering that the

attached equipment contains, and the power supply ( a circuit designed

to produce filtered DC power from the 60hz AC line ) and end up on

audio circuitry in such a way that it could change the way the the

signal is handled. Then, that difference has to be large enough for the

listener to identify it.

Given the poor quality of most of the power supplies that are used in

audio equipment I suppose this is *possible* But I'll wager in a

double blind test that there isn't a person alive who could tell the

difference with the EMI levels that are typically seen on power

cables...