Hi,
sideshowbob said:
Anything "can be" highly significant. The fact is, if, in general, power cables actually were highly significant, that significance would be clearly audible, and there would be unequivocal evidence for it.
Well, first of all, the implication is of course that if something CAN be significant under certain circumstances we need to define next these.
sideshowbob said:
You can finesse round this basic fact all you like, the credibility gap is on your side of the debate until you provide some evidence.
I am not sure what credibility gap you are talking about.
It is trivial to illustrate that all mains powered audio gear is subject to various leakage currents into the chassis/signal ground. These currents must go somewhere if more than one piece of equipment is present and they are interconnected by conductive means.
Further, the current flowing in the mains cable is of a highly pulsed nature (not a 50Hz sinewave) with a lot of high order harmonics in most conventional gear, using torroidal transformers or switched mode supplies is especially notable.
If our mains cable has a high differential mode inductance or resistance we will experience a material voltage dropped which will invariably find it's way into the audio circuitry.
The final issue worth noting is the amount of RF in the air. On much commercial gear, when fitted with a standard £0.25 Mains cable I merely need to dial a number on my mobile to get a measurable (and audible ticking) output despite shorted inputs. Using for example shielded mains cables with some build in (ferrite) filtering which do not have to be expensive pretty much excludes the field from my mobile.
If you find all that incredible you may need to (re) take EE101.
BTW, NOTE that I am not in favour of "expensive" cables per se, however small scale hand build items do cost money.
In the case of mains cables I am VERY MUCH in favour of avoiding specialist cables as most of them do not have the neccesary safety approvals, which alone disqualifies from use. The key point from my end is that for any particular genre of cables there are reasons why there is a potential to cause audible differences, usually simply due to the designed in problems in much audio gear.
I have also observed some other items which seem to defy at this stage sensible explanation (the difference between silver and copper conductors, which becomes rather disturbingly large when transformers are wound with silver - not that I think the silver wound transformers neccesarily to be better BTW, another one is the effect quarz crystals in equipment - that is not the oscillators, but the ones you buy in the new age shop), but that does indicate to me a requirement to deny them.
So, bottomline, make sure you have actually attempted to understand what goes on, before making grand pronouncements and keep an open mind about the rest. Sadly the lack of actual serious investigation and understanding lineary leads to the extremes of charlatanery we can see in the fringes of audio accessories and which gives perfectly sensible people who actually do serious research and attempt to address real issues a bad name too, by being tared with the same big brush.
Ciao T