Fancy mains leads - Not so phoolish?

[Diabolical Artificer]

Just watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaGE-zDoxuY and whilst still sceptical that £200 mains leads will improve the response on a piece of audio gear, I'm willing at least to concede there may be something in it.

Dave Pensado is a producer/engineer and has been in the business for years, that and as his ears are trained to pick up nuance's in music your average Fred Blogs ear's might not pick up, lead me to at least suspend disbelief somewhat.

As I understand it, he's saying that a bog standard lead acts as a bottle neck and does'nt let current flow as fast it should. More technical info here .... http://www.essentialsound.com/power-...technology.htm

I cant afford £200 however I should hear a difference if I wire an amp say, to the mains with
2.5mm twin and earth straight to the mains tfmr in said DUT. Right?

I know we've been here before ... lots of times but thought that it deserves another look, as the maker at least sounds like he knows his stuff and isn't talking out his pipe.

Andy.

[Station X]

Originally Posted by Dr Wobble

his ears are trained to pick up nuance's in music your average Fred Blogs ear's might not pick up

I have average hearing. Why should I spend £200 on a mains cable which gives an improvement I can't hear?

[Cobaltblue]

Just anther Way to separate the hard of thinking from their money.

Cheers Mike T

[M0FYA Andy]

If indeed "a bog standard lead acts as a bottle neck and doesn't let current flow as fast it should", then the problem will be solved by replacing said lead with a short heavy mains lead more suited to a washing machine.
At a fraction of the £200 quoted.

Andy

[kalee20]

I like to keep an open mind about things, but as an engineer I find this not credible.

On DC mains, there could be some merit in a low impedance line between power source and equipment, assuming that any filtering within the equipment was minimal and there wasn't any hash or noise on the power source. But none of that applies today.

On AC mains, the rectifiers are between the National Grid and the (necessary) reservoir capacitors. Any impedance in series will serve to broaden the current pulses and reduce their amplitude. Reducing such impedance will actually increase power supply ripple, not what is wanted - if you can hear anything at all, you'll hear an increase in background hum! So more impedance is better. Unless, that is, that the current flow is so restricted that the DC voltage rails fall so low that the amplifier starts clipping - but this would be so easily measurable and highly audible that you'd know immediately!

[Aerodyne]

The idea that replacing a mains lead to remove the effect described ignores the fact that the mains wiring supplying the socket in use must perforce also create the unwanted response limiting - all the way from the supply source.
It simply isn't logical, unless I've missed something important...
Tony

[Radio Wrangler]

So where do you stop?

Inside the amplifier, is all the wiring made by a specialist audiophile company? Especially the winding wire in the transformers. You'll need an audiophile plug, because that would be the next bottleneck up the chain, then there's your ring main. I'm sure there's audiophile stuff for this. Consumer unit? The same current has to flow through that and fuses or MCBs are definitely bottlenecks - they have to be. Meter tails? then there are the windings in the meter... more meter tails, company fuse? and all the stuff back to the substation.

The big point is that it's an electrical CIRCUIT. Current has to flow round the whole thing. No one bit is any more or less important than any other bit. You don't own all the bits. The amount of the cirtcuit that you could replace with audiophile grade stuff is rather small.

Audiophile interest in mains leads shows that audiophiles believe that influences don't stop at transformers (and I have to agree with them, I've spent a lot of my life passing complex signals through transformers). So now we have to do the 11kV distribution network, and ultimately the power station.

Instead of that volcanic island and finishing off my positronic ray, maybe I should save up to buy a small street of rather pleasant houses, in some pleasant area. Build an audiophile power station with a generator wound with approved wire, an audiophile grade substation and distribution network, audiophile approved meters for each house. Imagine the selling price! If a scrotty bit of cable fetches £200, a full audiophile wired home with audiophile wire right back to an audiophile power source ought to be immensely profitable.

This is me being silly, and what makes it silly is that there is no sense of proportion Some things are going to fall below the thresholds of perception. Where do you draw the line? There has to be one, or you need to convert the entire universe to audiophile stuff. Some of the audiophile subjectivist bunch have decided that there can be no threshold to their perception of sounds. That leaves the door wide open.

Human hearing is surprisingly good, but not perfect by along chalk. Have you ever tried making a microphone with built-in real-time spectrum analyser out of meat?

Thermodynamics sets a noise floor that can't be escaped and that puts one threshold on perception whether by flesh or machine.

So it comes down to whether a 2m bit of flexible cable with two connectors can make an audible difference, sufficiently to be perceived. I think it can. I use cables at radio frequencies and microwave frequencies where their limitations really become significant. However, for a 2m mains cable powering an amplifier outputting several watts, there would have to be something badly wrong to make it cause a discernible problem.

1.5 square millimetre conductors and good, sound connectors. Ordinary copper and brass ought to be indistinguishable from anything fatter or more expensive, unless that expense is spent on doing something worse.

The only defence against all the weasel words trying to flog us overpriced unnecessary stuff is a sense of scale and proportion.

David

[Goldieoldie]

If they are worried about the PSU not being gutsy enough for these deep bass notes, then why not use very large reservoir caps ( with suitable protection circuitry ) ?
That would be much more credible as a solution to the power bottle neck problem.

[G8HQP Dave]

When you push and push at audiophiles and their strange ideas you will eventually (or quickly, in some cases) force them to admit that they don't really believe that known physics and maths is adequate to explain audio circuitry. At that point you need do no more.

Kirchoff-denial, Fourier-denial, Shannon-denial, 'basic circuit theory'-denial are all to be found on an audio website near you. Some sites specialise in this ignorance. The fact that someone is a musician or recording engineer is sometimes used as evidence that their nonsense must be taken seriously.

[paulsherwin]

This sort of personal advocacy is without value. It doesn't matter how good his hearing is or how much experience he has with sound engineering. You need to demonstrate superiority using a double blind listening test. I haven't watched the video, but does it show such a test? I suspect not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

[Thyristor]

Wasn't it Peter Walker who said something like 'any probem in audio can be solved with Ohms law, and common sense'

[Radio Wrangler]

Indeed it was, and the statement about a piece of wire with gain.

But the problem with relying on common sense is that it seems to be a lot less common than it used to be.

David

[Hartley118]

Listening tests can be stressful, particularly in the professional studio world, where a major contract may stand or fall on the result.

The career of a balance engineer is crucially dependent on clients' opinion of his or her ears, so there can be a tendency to hype their hearing ability. Useful balance skills may be adjusting the critical EQ settings on a drum kit so that it still sounds good on consumer equipment, or, as I've personally observed, the ability to hear a tube train approaching under the old Kingsway Hall before anyone else notices it! However, that doesn't necessarily lead to being a reliable judge of cable sound.

As Paul points out, listening tests are very rarely double blind. If you've just spent £stupid on some addition to your system, you're likely to listen much more acutely and therefore perceive nuances you hadn't noticed before.

There's error in any subjective listening test, and the perceived difference from changing one decent mains lead to a different but very expensive one is a good way of calibrating that error!

Martin

[Mike. Watterson]

Fake snake oil

[emeritus]

About the only thing that might make technical sense is the screen that shields mains wires from any audio cables that might be nearby, but I have my doubts. The linked video only shows the guys saying how good it is. For technical data you are referred to a slide show on the essentialsound.com web site. I haven't visited it.

No personal experience of US wiring practice, but I do remember reading that the impedance of the local step-down transformers that are commonly used to supply US dwellings with a split 120/240V supply was taken into account in the design of GLS lamp bulbs, as it limited the switch-on inrush current.

[Skywave]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

But the problem with relying on common sense is that it seems to be a lot less common than it used to be.

Yes, true, but I believe that the trouble with so-called 'common sense' is that it is subjective. One person's 'common sense' is not the same as that of another. Therefore, the concept of 'common sense' is a contradiction in terms. Or let me put it this way: what is 'obvious' to one person can be anything but 'obvious' to another.

OTOH, 'common sense' has no place in mathematics, the queen and servant of science. The foundations of mathematics and everything deriving from those foundations is based on rational thinking and logical argument.

Al.

[Station X]

I've found it's never productive to try to disprove someone's opinions (prejudices?) by using scientific facts and logic.

[Diabolical Artificer]

Re post #2, good point Graham. TBH, I can't hear some of the differences with regards to mix 1 vs mix 2 some recording engineers/producers go on about, but I've had mixes I've done worked on by more experienced engineer's and made better. It can be a subtle art.

I agree with all that's been said but for a minute there I was slightly persuaded mainly because Dave Pensado knows his onions and said beforehand he thought the concept was BS but heard a difference.

Oh well, back to being a cynic.

Andy.

Sometimes I wish I was dishonest enough to make and sell "audiophile" leads etc..

[Refugee]

Well there is a few other things to say.
First the regulation has to be good on the mains input and if you are in the last house at the end of a phase as is my case some works do from time to time have to happen on the company side of the meter.
Flickering lights and streams of acrid smoke are the symptom and half an hour of dreadful music over the phone is the illness suffered while waiting for an engineer to fix it.

Next you need coal in the earth line.
If you do not live on land with a redundant coal mine a few hundred feet below the surface as we do there is an add on coal bunker on the market for your audio gear.

http://www.mableaudio.com/en/productview.asp?sid=6036