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In Reply to: Power cord recommendation needed - more "full-bodied" than Virtual Dynamics Nite. posted by carcass93 on April 17, 2007 at 12:45:50:
Power cords certainly differ in how much of the music your system can deliver when they are installed. Part of this has to do with the cord's inherent electrical properties, part to do with its mechanical vibration properties, but a lot of the performance has to do with how the cord participates in your system's electrical noise environment. Your system will sound bad in a noisy environment regardless of how good any individual power cord may be.Mid-bass vagueness and midrange dryness are symptoms of RF noise. Unfortunately, there is no simple magic bullet to cure RF noise. Every cord and cable in your audio system, every power supply in your audio components, every non-audio appliance more sophisticated than a toaster, and your house's power wiring, all combine to establish your RF noise environment.
You may get more benefit from using a simple tweak like the Hammond 193L choke wired as a parallel filter (posted by Alan Maher) than by swapping power cords.
Follow Ups:
In my system and to my ears, power cords change so much that it would be strange to assume "fullness" of the sound wouldn't be affected.Which doesn't mean of course that tweaking something else wouldn't work. Couple of thoughts:
1. There's relatively widespread opinion that power cords also act as filters, at least some of them.
2. There's discussion on these pages of PS Audio Noise Harvester vs. other "filtering" tweaks. Would be interesting to try both and compare.
Yes, you can affect fullness of the sound, which I would call a warm, natural, and revealing midrange and mid-bass. We do not often think of 'revealing' as applied to mid-bass, but it can be a real consequence of removing RF noise.My point is that achieving this tonal quality requires reducing the effects of RF noise in your whole audio system and in your house wiring. A single power cord change may modify the RF noise environment, but cannot resolve all RF noise problems. Hence my recommendation of Alan's Hammond choke tweak (the parsimonious audiophile's version of the Richard Gray Power Station).
All electrical cables that are terminated in mis-matched impedances act as filters, so that includes just about all audio power cords. The filtering action may not be what you want, however. Low-loss cables with severe impedance mis-match terminations are high-Q resonators, and the resulting amplification of selected RF tones (in the VHF and UHF bands, primarily) can cause significant problems when these tones intermix with the audio signal. They result in spurious audio-band tones that mimic overtones, but are not musical because they are not necessarily even-order harmonics of the musical fundamentals. They cause a dry, disconnected midrange and a veiled mid-bass, as well as excessive treble energy.
IMO, cables with lumped-element filters built in to them are not successful because the remaining segments of the cable act as resonators.
I agree...don't bother wrapping power cords...too many things can go wrong is not done correctly. Experimenting gets expensive after awhile. The choke is the right wat to go.
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