Stock cables
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsDuring the latter half of the 1990’s I was busy with a new preamp design that was more of a personal project than anything for the company. That project would become, after a number of years, the PCA-2 preamplifier we released after the turn of the millennium, but during the 90’s it was just something for me to play with.
The whole contraption was built on a piece of particle board and mounted to the board was a rather large power transformer feeding the preamp. To feed the power transformer I had an IEC inlet dangling off the side and to make sure I didn’t damage anything on the board I was using a rather flexible and small gauge (size) power cord to feed it. The power cord was plugged into our new (at the time) P300 Power Plant.
The sound of that prototype preamp was good but lacked body – it just sounded a bit thin in the midbass and everything I had tried to remedy it was less than successful. In the past I had achieved greater midbass weight by increasing the size of the power transformer but in this case there wasn’t any more room on my particle board “chassis” to do so. On a whim I grabbed one of the heavier gauge stock power cables we used to feed our Power Plants and connected the preamp with that. I was pretty shocked at the difference.
Moving from the skinny 14 gauge power cable to the heavier 12 gauge power cable made a noticeable improvement to the fullness and richness of the lower octaves of the music. It was quite repeatable and fascinating all at the same time.
Why would a heavier gauge power cable make any difference on a preamp? I could understand a power amp where it’s important to never starve the amp for wall power, but a preamp? The whole preamp running class A drew perhaps 10 watts – absolutely nothing when it comes to current draw.
Tomorrow the wheels begin to spin.
Paul, you found it fascinating; I find it frustrating. For quite a long time I’ve been aware of the differences in sound that wires practically anywhere in the electrical or electronic circuits can make. A professor of acoustics and I ran our own informal experiments with wire, particular interconnects. We discovered twenty years ago that we were unable to consistently correlate measured characteristics of wire types and sizes with the way things sounded to us. We could describe the differences but could not explain them in terms of electrical parameters.
Lately I’ve discovered that my upper range panel speakers have an appetite for pure silver wire. The distributor of the wire who also makes interconnects and speaker cable assures me that for my short (4 foot) runs, 20 ga soft, single strand silver wire is sufficient. Well, I had my doubts about that since I had already used 9 to 12 ga copper, both round and flat. But I tried it and found beautifully clear and “grain-free” upper octaves, but absolutely no body, much as you describe with your stock cable. So I kept increasing the gauge, each time filling in the lower octaves more and more. So I’m now down to 12 ga. with my panel speakers crossed over at 300 Hz, and the sound is still a bit anemic. The next larger size is 10 ga, but silver wire is very expensive, and I’ve not gone there yet.
I tried paralleling the silver with large gauge copper which cures the light weight sound, but found that at the high frequency extreme they behave slightly differently, and fight each other. I assume they are not completely in phase and their high frequency interactions produce the sizzling garbage that I hear. Separately they each have smooth top ends, with the nod going to the silver wire.
The point of my gibberish is that nothing that I’ve been made aware of explains why using grossly over-sized wire makes the lower octaves (below 2000 Hz) sound fuller. Perhaps you, or someone else out there, will explain it.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. My intent is to merely explain the steps I went through to figure out our first power cable and what conclusions I drew. I know many people don’t believe a word of this because they cannot make sense of it – therefore it must not be true – however, many of us have graduated from this shallow thought process and hence I relay the story without any prejudice.
Take it or leave it.
My guess is that wire gauge does not add fullness, but rather some factors of construction detract from it and when you go to the larger gauge, whatever is detracting from the fullness gets reduced.
I was a “size matters” believer in gauge until very recently. In my nuclear power plant project manager days I designed/worked with everything from dainty jumpers in microprocessor units, 4-20 mA current loop twisted pair cables, to 120V, 480V, 4160V, 345KV, and hydrogen-cooled aluminum cylindrical conducts in isolated bus ducts at the output of 1,1000 Megawatt generators. In all cases, design margin above the accepted minimum would be employed.
In building my new system I was driven to have excellent power quality, and one of my first purchases were a P-5, a soloist outlet to terminate my dedicated line, and five Noise Harvesters. All my cables were either 8 gauge or 9 gauge conductors. On a challenge from a dealer that I had not visited in years, I took home a discontinued Nordost Vishnu power cable that they used as a demo. Three 16 gauge conductors? You must be kidding! Nordost rated the cable at 20 amps. I put it in expecting to hear all the bad things one would expect from an undersized cable. To my amazement, it improved the sound know matter where I put it, even feeding the P-5 and feeding my 440 watt per channel amp. Can’t be possible.
There is a school of thought which could easily be dismissed as marketing hype that one should build a “cable loom” of identical cables throughout the system. Several cable companies promote this idea, and it could well be self-serving. I will not offer any argument for or against the concept, but I will say that I now all cables in my system are those little three 16 gauge designs and the results are what I was looking for. I cannot disprove the cable loom idea from my experience.
Much of the current research in cables is focused on neutralizing the adverse effects of the dielectric. Nordost does this by effectively using “air” as the dielectric, Shunyata uses a circuit to offset the electric field in the dialectic in their “Zitron” cables. I have always like the PS Audio cables and tried to build a cable loom of them as well, but failed due to availability.
As I experienced on the golf course yesterday, designing a great power cable may be a bit like sinking a “side-hill” putt, often called a “speed putt.” There are on infinite combinations of speed and angle that will work, but it is a challenge to find one that pulls it all together. Bravo to the companies, like PS Audio, that try new things but ultimately use their ears as the final, and highest resolution, test device.
Now that’s fascinating. What, in particular, is unique in this Nordost cable that makes the 3-conductor cable work?
Paul,
Beats me! The third conductor is just the drain. Their ridiculously expensive Odin cable uses seven 15 gauge conductors, three per side of the hot and neutral. I misspoke on the rating, it is 25 amps for my modest cables and 60 amps for the Odin. I guess it is a good mix of geometry, effective deployment of solid core conductors, the low resistance, even for small gauge (4.0 Ohms/1000ft as terminated) low capacitance (10 pF/ft) and a little bit of pixie dust thrown in for good measure. I do chuckle when I read that my cable has a transmission speed of “in excess of 85% the speed of light.” What the heck does that mean to sound quality? Folks with a “need for speed” can invest the price a small car in an Odin and pick up another 1% of the speed of light. Doesn’t sound like much, but even by Jethro Bodine’s ciphering that’s about 3 million meters per second. Personally, I could give a rip if my cables were slower than a Chicago Bear cornerback, as long as they sound great. For reasons unknown, and seemingly defying physics, they just do.
As particles approach the speed of light they start to increase in mass. The closer to light speed the more massive they become. Since the Odin allows electrons to travel faster by a significant 1%, the electrons are more massive consequently allowing for the transmission of a more full bodied sound.
🙂
Aha! Thanks Terry, I hadn’t considered that. By controlling the speed of electricity to get close to the speed of light, one can increase the mass of the copper to get just the right fullness. Brilliant. 🙂
As you approach the speed of light, time (or the perception of time) slows down. So a light, thin ditty becomes a thick, full dirge. Tina Turner, singing “nice and rough,” becomes Ike Turner, singing “nice and easy,”
Hello Paul, the power amplifier converts electrical current into analog sound, before reaching the speakers and therefore is the main source of energy for this process. I guess you know that better than anyone.
I have a similar experience, but with speaker cable. My main speakers are Advent Heritage tower, which consists of 2 8-inch woofer and tweter in the top. Once I took the woofer and tweter to see the wiring that originally brought and found they were very thin, so I decided to replace them with Audioquest Type 4 plus the time and place as is, with Jaquet and everything.
I expected to improve fundamentally the treble as it is the longest path signal travels, the worse my surprise was that improved the power and clarity of the low frequencies, which the cable length for the woofer is only 20 centimeters at most .
Yup, that sounds about right. 🙂
OK, but my problem as audiophile, I have no comparison measures. In Chile, there are few places, convenience stores audio equipment, or friends who have hi-fi to listen and compare. I’m also a musician, sound engineer or viewer of concerts and live show. Stores do not have good acoustics too.
All I’ve done, changing equipment, cables, building my listening room, reading the Internet, magazines, tweeks, ….. and comparing it with what I had done anteriomente.
It is a solitary hobby.
I forgot, Bryston in their amps SST square not use cables.
The ‘Engineered’ approach to Power cables would be by ‘sound’ analysis and elimination.
With FAT cables you do get a fatter Sound?? Hmm! Thought provoking.
The multi-strands in Power Cables is used to make the Cable ‘flexible ‘ enough to route through the assemebled HiFi equipment and yet connect to the wall socket.
When you DO use Solid fat wire, you tend to replicate the Wiring in your LAB/House.
Its the nearest thing to the House wiring. Perhaps thats the reason it sounds good. In fact the fat wiring adds nothing at all. Resistance, Inductance….whatever you can measure?
Why not measure 6feet of the WIRING in the walls and then use the same to make SOLID FAT POWER wire for your Power Supply? and do check the difference?