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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: Good points.

"My jaundiced view on power cord sensitivity is that outside of coupling with other cables in the rear tangle that it's an indicator of equipment deficiencies. And systemic ones of course, but we are largely stuck with those."

We may be more or less be stuck with whatever built in system deficiencies are present once we've bought high quality gear supporting our toplogy of choice but we aren't stuck with a particular power cord if it turns out a different one addresses any those deficiencies in some way. But I agree, the gear shouldn't care about the cord for the most part by design. Could this mean controlling return current paths by design in a way any uneducated consumer could accomplish an install by reading the instructions? hmm never heard that around here befre...To do this would also imply controlling the current loops all over the countryside that single ended systems often end up being.

jneutron now has me convinced after a recent discussion on another forum: perhaps the best advice, since we may be waiting forever for the manufacturers to take up the torch, is just to bundle everything in the ratsnest at the back as tight as possible in SE systems, ie power cords, line cords, to reduce loop area. This seems like the next best thing to having it solved by design to me. It's easy for anybody to understand the process of bundling cords tightly even twisting and shielding the bundle if your a complete madman.

The idea of bundling the line cords tightly with the power cords sounded a bit funny to me at first.

In my system doing this did not introduce any noticible coupling between the signals that I could hear. Maybe I'm going deaf or could have used a better test signal to help isolate the issues I've caused but my current opinion is this is a better way for me to string the wires with my setup.

Doing it like this seems to make my system even lower noise but only in extreme circumstances. I wasn't normally having any noise problems to begin with due to how I configured my system to keep loop areas quite small in the first place but now I'm doing even better. In fact under normal circumstances I was achieving my systems rated noise specs per my testing even before I bundled. The one real noise problem I had left was a mild popping from the somewhat frequent (maybe 2-3 times per year that I am aware of) nearby (neghbor on hill across the street) lightning strikes. Apparently the voltages induced in my system weren't bad enough to do damage but I was hearing it. Since I've bundled per jneutron recs I have yet to hear the popping during these nearby lightning events.

The thing that I think may be the coolest about this idea is that it's easy to describe to a newb. Say "bind the wires in a tight bundle" and everyone will know what you mean. I gurantee there will be some who say it isn't a god idea but my experiments suggest it is for me.


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