Quote:
Originally posted by Dot
This is the "High End" forum - so let's not flinch at a few hundred dollars. And the people who are posting in the topic who've had first-hand experience with better AC cables are chiming in that they actually hear not just a subtle difference, but a dramatic difference.
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You're distorting things here, dot. I've heard AND DOUBLE-BLIND TESTED two of the "high-end" AC cables (>$100 per cable) and heard NO REPEATABLE, DISCERNABLE DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER. Even with microphone cables and interconnects, I have yet to hear a meaningful difference when lengths and wire gauges are the same. So your generalizations that the people "who've had first-hand experience with better AC cables are chiming in that they actually hear... a dramatic difference" is a highly selective reading of a long sea of posts that indicate otherwise. Kind of like the reading of the Bible that finds the 137 times it says "There is no God..."
One of the things you've kept stressing is the impact on digital gear. This is the most suspect part of your argument, since you provide no evidence of what kind of distortion is happening to one or the other signal. Is it jitter? Aliasing or phase shift near the Nyquist frequency?
You can run simple computer-based tests with digital gear to determine if the signal of an AD converter is altered by changing out power or digital audio cables. Digitize a pre-recorded signal signal (such as the analog output of a CD player). Swap cables. Do it again. Chop the two regions in an audio editing program so that they are the exact length and start at the same point. Compare. Are they the same? If not, how different are they?
I have been able to get bit-accurate digitizations of the same analog signal using many different AES cables (including "audiophile" ones), and I challenge you to scientifically create results that prove otherwise when using different power cables.
There was a thread a while back where someone claimed that different computer hard drives imparted a different sonic quality - some, of course, were better suited for digital audio. No shit - he said they sounded "warmer."