Mains Cable dabble

Hahaha, how true.

Apologies, Whisky. The Scottish single malt type

With the youngest whisky being 25 years old, I would hope so!

No needle between me and MrC, quite the contrary.

Tony I dont have any suitable test kit to analyze audio output, hence the question. The point to the question was that mains cables aren't typically filters, so I'm curious what they can offer.

I'm 100% behind devices that filter and reject noise components, I use both dc blockers and high current input filters.

So, is there anything to show fancy plugs, socket and high purity wire affecting the measured output of a device.

I unplugged one of mine, and I had the inkiest black you will ever hear. It lasted until I put the cable back in.

There seem to be two camps. Those that believe and those that don't.

I thought I heard a small difference, so bought a couple.

It also makes me wonder why we spend so much on speaker cables and interconnects, as surely there is no point in going above what is used in the HiFi components and what is used inside the speakers?

Chiminea? There goes Global warming spike!

He unplugged it.....ie turned it off lol

Interconnects and speaker cable are in the signal path, the mains cable isn't.

if you alter the capacitance, resistance, reactance in the signal path it may alter the signal, and change what comes out at the end. Even if you don't change all of it, i.e the wiring inside the equipment and speakers remains the same. 

Even then the effect of changing interconnects or cable tends to be small if it has any effect at all. But it is at least explainable as a physical change within known parameters.

Changing anything is likely to  create some perceived effect because that is how our brains work, there's no real way around that. It doesn't mean that anything actually changed in objective reality. 

I put rubber washing machine feet under a solid state integrated amplifier. My perception was that the sound changed for the worse. It was a strong perception. Despite knowing the feet are doing nothing I was unable to unhear the effect. 


Do I think the signal from the output of the amplifier was changed in any way? No, of course not. That would be impossible. But it was also impossible for me not to have the perception that it had changed.  

it is not easy to accept that this is how our minds work. It is counter-intuitive. But it's reality. Regrettably the nature of hi-fi as a pursuit means it is possible to exploit this weakness of human perception to sell all sorts of products that do nothing. Check out Peter Belt, or Machina Dynamica where this is taken to the extreme.

I still wonder if they started it as a piss-take and then discovered that people were actually buying the products so decided to carry on.

years ago on one of the Yank forums there was someone who claimed to have paid for the telephone tweak and was convinced that it had worked. But I suppose he could just have been entering into the spirit of it.

I use the teleportation tweak weekly.

Bonkers