Speaker wire - does it matter?

You know what's great , and I really hope this continues.....?

We are treating each other with courtesy and respect, within a couple of topics on this board atm that would normally turn to shit very fast.

Kudos, and lets keep it up.


Cheers

Wiz

struck out at depot, they didn't have any in stock, as a matter of fact, they don't stock them anymore?? I will be going to a electric supply house next week to pick up the outlets for the balanced conditioners i'm building, so we'll have to wait till then, unless someone else picks one up.

Whoa hold that, don't rush to the Hubbles, I did a little snooping around myself. There are some things in this article guys here obviously need no help in, regarding installing an outlet, so just skip over them, but down in the lower third are some key statements that mirror my experience, and I was at this long before this article. Bear with me guys, Art Dudley is one of the senior editors at Sterophile, and well known for shall we say.. not paying a penny more than he has to.. The article addresses many of the issue folks here have questioned, so here goes:


Art Dudley Listening
Listening #11
By Art Dudley • Posted: Nov 23, 2003 • Published: Nov 1, 2003
Autumn comes to the Cherry Valley Feed & Seed. The 50-lb sacks of sawgrass and lime give way to mulch and sand for local drives, and the swing sets and folding chairs and posthole diggers and bug zappers and flagpoles have been brought inside until next spring, which is scheduled for mid-June.
I'm more concerned with what's inside, so I make my way past a Rid-X display to the front counter and ask where the AC outlets are. "I want the best you have," I tell the owner. She remembers me from when I moved to the area a few months ago and asked for the best picture hangers, lock washers, and flyswatter she had, and, being so reminded, she decides against merely pointing with her sandwich but rather escorts me to the shelf where the outlets sit. I find I have a choice of two—or did, until I spoke up and identified myself as the David Gest of rural hardware—and the best one in the store is the model 426 from Eagle Electric, a division of Cooper Wiring Devices of Long Island City. Model 426 is a 15-amp grounding receptacle that's surprisingly robust, and it sells for a mere 65 cents, though I'm told I can get bulk quantities for even less if I qualify for a contractor's discount. I don't, because I want only one.

What does the model 426 have that its cheaper competitor—which costs a little less than half a dollar—does not? They're both sturdy, both equipped with color-coded screw terminals, both made in the US. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that the cheaper one is sold loose, from a bin, while the former is individually packaged in a nice little box.

But the PS Audio Power Port AC receptacle comes in an even nicer box: a clear plastic cylinder, with heavy paper inserts bearing encouraging words, like "Hospital Grade Connection" and "Easy to Install." (The direction sheet packed inside says, "For installation by a qualified electrician," but hold that thought for now.) And, most important of all, "Why rely on a cheap AC receptacle to power your expensive audio and video equipment?"

That's a sales technique the "high-end" audio community uses a lot these days: playing off the consumer's sense of fiscal imbalance. Why use cheap speaker wires to connect your expensive speakers? Why use a cheap AC cord on your expensive amplifier? Why put your expensive audio equipment in a room made out of cheap lumber and nails? (I can see it now: "Replace the nails in your listening room with our scientifically designed, nonmagnetic WonderNails®!") Why wear cheap underpants when you're listening to expensive records on an expensive turntable?

I'm immune to such things, of course (haw), and the reason I have a pair of PS Audio Power Ports on hand is because someone gave them to me, which is the same thing as giving me a column, which is the same thing as giving me this month's paycheck. I wanted to earn my keep and give them a fair try (footnote 1).

The Power Port Classic is outwardly similar to the duplex AC outlets in most American homes, with two sockets that protrude from the receptacle box, giving a flush-mount look when the usual plastic cover is screwed into place. Its enclosure is made of fiber-reinforced thermoplastic, the face is thermoplastic polyester, and the back-frame and mounting screws are stainless steel. All of the Power Port's terminal screws are silicon bronze, and its internal contacts are "high-purity" brass plated with 15 coats of polished nickel.

How does the Eagle 426 compare? It isn't as heavy or as outwardly rugged as the PSA outlet, and the Eagle's materials are decidedly cheaper, too, including brass contacts that aren't plated at all, and mounting hardware made from galvanized rather than stainless steel. (The Eagle's back-frame makes up for that one, though, by having a handy wire stripper built in.)

The biggest difference is apparent during actual use: Plugging an AC cord into the Power Port requires more effort, and the PSA receptacle grips the plug with significantly more force. The company's website describes the Power Port as having "the grip of Mickey Mantle." The Eagle, by comparison, is more like Igor Stravinsky.

Here, incidentally, is the meaning of "hospital grade": Electrical hardware can be designated as such by Underwriter's Laboratory (UL) only if it can be demonstrated to be spark-free under that organization's rigorous testing. Products so approved are then marked with UL's green dot. (The dot is not, as suggested elsewhere in the hi-fi community, a trademark of the Hubbell Corporation—although that, too, is something I'll get back to in a moment.) The best way to make a connection spark-free is to make it Very Damn Tight. Our assumption, of course, is that a very tight, very positive AC connection will also improve the performance of whatever product is at the other end of the AC cord.

Prior to actually trying the Power Port, I was of two minds: In one was my disdain for the WonderPants come-on described in paragraph five. In the other was the certainty that the vibration and heat that result from a flimsy connection—one through which up to 20 amps of high-voltage current are drawn—must surely be counterproductive. This one could go either way.

First, let's talk installation. And before we do that, let me tell you that neither Primedia Inc., nor I, nor even Sam Tellig can be held responsible for injury or death resulting from half-assed attempts at installing your own Power Port. You should never try to replace an AC receptacle on your own unless you're absolutely sure of what you're doing, because it takes just one little slip to put you in a place where everything is hospital-grade.

So here's what you do—or, rather, what our lawyers want you to not do: Go to the breaker box inside your home and identify the circuit breaker that affects the AC outlet you wish to replace. Once you've found it, and assuming no dialysis units or PlayStations are plugged into the same circuit, flip the breaker to its Off position, then go back to the outlet and test it. You can use a multimeter or a lamp—I recommend against using a radio, because if it's tuned to an NPR station there's a 50-50 chance that there'll be dead air at any given moment, thus confusing your test results—but whichever you choose, make thoroughly sure that both outlets on your duplex receptacle are utterly dead.

Now use a small screwdriver to remove the single screw that holds the cover in place; as you'll see, this fastens to a threaded insert in the receptacle itself. Then loosen and remove the two screws that hold the receptacle to the utility box in which it nestles, itself probably nailed or screwed to an adjacent furring strip. Pull the receptacle toward you carefully, noting the orientation of the AC wiring and separate ground. Examine those wires carefully: Ideally, they'll be solid (unstranded) copper, ranging in size from 14 to 10 gauge, but if they're aluminum—as they may very well be, especially in new housing—stop what you're doing, screw everything back together, and call the electrician. Installing a high-quality outlet on an aluminum-wired circuit is probably pointless, and PS Audio joins me in recommending against it.

If your wires are good, now's the time to disconnect them from the existing receptacle, again noting which color goes where. Common practice in the US is to have black-insulated wire for the hot line (remember the mnemonic device: black bites) and white for the neutral or return line. Standard practice also calls for the hot screws, on one side of the receptacle, to be brass-colored, while the neutral screws, on the opposite side, are nickel. The bare ends of the wires are usually wrapped around those terminals, and while the PSA Power Port has similar screws, these serve a different purpose: The Power Port, like other modern, high-quality receptacles, is "back-wired," meaning there are four round openings on its back which accept bare wire, following which the installer tightens the adjacent screw to clamp the wire in place—a neat, safe, positive way of doing things.

By the way, I recommend cutting the existing bare tips from all your wires and stripping the insulation to expose fresh ends; a gauge is molded into the back of the receptacle to show how long the new tips need to be. A clean connection is a good connection, and since back-wiring requires slightly less in the way of total length, you won't miss the extra slack.

The final step before re-testing is to fasten the ground connection—which isn't back-wired like the others, but rather uses a traditional green screw terminal. Be sure to wrap the wire clockwise, so that tightening the connection will tend to draw the wire toward the shaft of the screw rather than away from it.

Somewhere, someone is baking a pie...
Is your hi-fi in the living room? If so, someone has probably been waiting patiently for the power to come back on. So please disregard safety and rush through the remaining steps.

A moment ago I said that either a multimeter or a lamp can be used to test your handiwork, but in fact only a multimeter will give you a complete look at what's happening in your home's electrical system. (But how "complete" do you want to be? If you want to identify the harmonic spectrum of noise on your line, you'll want a spectrum analyzer and lots of other cool toys...)

Re-set the circuit breaker, then set your multimeter to measure AC and, if necessary, select a range that can accommodate 120V or so. Begin by touching the multimeter's black probe to the contact nestled inside the neutral socket (the larger one), and the red probe to the hot contact: The meter should see 120V or thereabouts. Next, move the black probe to the ground contact, keeping the red one on hot: Again, 120V is the correct answer.

But when you keep the black probe on the ground contact and move the red probe to the neutral, you should detect nothing more than a volt or so—anything more than that requires Professional Help. The fact that there's any current there at all under normal circumstances is attributable to the difference in series resistance between the ground and neutral runs—which, although connected at one point, travel different routes and serve different masters. Different numbers of ohms makes for different ground potentials, one above the other—which means voltage, which means current. (That, incidentally, is why star grounding schemes make for superior hi-fi components, all other things being equal, and why manufacturers like Naim recommend plugging all the components in your system into the same AC outlet, à la their infamous "hydra-head" tweak of a few years back.)

Please note that the above is not the same as the "leakage current" caused by the capacitance between various conductors in some types of home wiring, nor is it the same as "leakage current" caused by some hi-fi components themselves under normal operation, when operated with the "wrong" AC plug orientation. Every few years some audio reviewer discovers that latter effect, hailing the "obvious night-and-day improvement" that correct orientation makes—and then describing in painful detail the steps one must go through in order to tell which is which, so that one's system can be made to operate at full potential. I love it: obvious and obscure.

Anyway, now that you've finished testing, and assuming your handiwork passed, you're done. Replace the face and be off with your bad self.

Is there enough of a performance difference to justify the trouble and expense? All things considered, yes: I heard the Power Port make a small, subtle, yet very real improvement in sonic performance. The difference was consistently audible with a wide variety of products, and I'm hard-pressed to think of another way to improve a hi-fi system for just $50.

The first Power Port I installed got the dual chores of supplying AC to my CD player and my Naim NAP110 power amp, which means it also powered my Naim 32.5 preamp, since the latter gets its DC from the former. The first disc I tried was the reissue of George Harrison's beautiful All Things Must Pass album, in particular "I Live for You." That one begins with a few notes on a pedal steel guitar—a nice test, as it turns out, because those notes sounded stronger, fuller, cleaner, and altogether more "solid" with the new outlets in place. I daresay this was at least partly so because there was even less going on behind them—ie, the nothingness had more nothing in it.

Of course, audiophiles always think they hear more bass whenever they "improve" their systems, and for that reason alone I tend to be skeptical of same. Yet in this case it was true, though that may also have been due to the Power Ports' increased levels of nothing.

Switching my amp and CD player back and forth between the upgraded receptacle and a nearby one in original condition yielded the same differences consistently, with all kinds of music: stronger music and blacker silence, with a slight, overall improvement in listening ease. Not a big difference, but a consistent difference, and always a step in the right direction.

Replacing the outlets that feed my Quads had an even bigger effect, which surprised me. Whether those original outlets happened to be in worse shape—science be damned, but I'm not about to switch receptacles back and forth on the same wires and outlet box—is nearly impossible to tell. Yet I was sufficiently convinced that I asked PS Audio if I could buy some more Power Ports for my other system.

While I had his attention, I also asked PSA's Paul McGowan about the differences between Power Ports and the ostensibly very-high-quality receptacles that are offered by the company that actually makes them, the aforementioned Hubbell Corporation of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Unlike the $29 tweeter in the $10,000-plus speaker from You-Know-Who, this is one case where a high-end audio manufacturer really is telling you the truth about having something custom-manufactured for his company alone. Hubbell makes at least six different variations on the hospital-grade duplex theme—not even counting the many color combinations available—and you'll find certain desirable features in all of them, including the thermoplastic face, the silicon bronze screws, and so forth. But none of the outlets in Hubbell's own line combines all of those features in one product—and none offers the heavily plated internal contacts of the Power Ports.

The question of value, then, is difficult to answer—but not impossible. There are those who would never spend 100 times the price of a hardware-store outlet on one that comes from an audio salon, and that's cool for them. There are those who will try to cheap out and buy stock Hubbell units at or near wholesale. I'll cut to the chase and tell you that the cheapest Hubbell hospital-grade receptacle you'll find is the model 8300, available for $17.72 a pop from the very nice people at Johnson Electric in Cincinnati. I'll also tell you it performs quite well compared to a cheap receptacle—but it's more difficult to install than the Power Port, and will almost certainly corrode many years sooner.

And there are those at the other end of the spectrum who will say that the Power Port isn't expensive enough, and that they would never dream of subjecting their household current to the indignities of anything as banal as nickel plating.

Sigh. The audio community is like a Brueghel painting. One quick look is all you need to tell which people have kids and which ones don't. I can only offer my personal opinion (in big, heaping doses), which boils down to one observation:

1) All the AC receptacles in my home that feed hi-fi components have now been changed over to PS Audio Power Ports.

---------------------------
ME Too ...

Sheeut, $239, yikes. That's funny!

Sorry about what's most likely the longest post in RealGear's history, but that article was good, in that the reviewer did the research some of us wanted to or were in the process of, and really clarified some of the things we were questioning. I must say I agree with the conclusion though, :-)
and I don't think John will regret the $49.95 cost of entry to find out for himself.

Trust me on this one, you won't regret it. Like the article stated at the end, the reviewer heard the same improvements across the board. Of course, it might not be as huge as changing out a piece if hardware, but each situation's a little different, so it's worth a shot.
I happened to have two different outlets near each other too, when I first installed the new outlets, and the difference was obvious.

Well, I've been at this for a while, and my ears say differently Sometimes what you think is what you get. If I switched radio shack's wire or monster cable wire for harmonic tech or acoustic zen, you'd have to be partially deaf not to hear the difference.
Don't think it's worth trying with open mind or ears ? your loss, not mine. If you're happy with lamp cord, your ahead of most of us, it's not so easy to be happy with the sounds you're getting.

That's cool, Real Traps are good products, I've used them, it's good to see another industry pro participating here.

Ethan's post does seem a little out of context though. If he did in fact read all five pages, he'd see the arc of my logic based on my experiences over 40 years, and some of the insights I've posted. As I said in the beginning, this is a can of worms, so just get some good speaker cables and put them on your stereo system and listen for a few days, then get back to me, the rest is all blather. I love how scientists keep trying to tell me what I'm hearing is either wrong or I'm somehow being fooled, because what I say I hear can't be true. After a while, it's just plain rude. When I said I trust my ears, that's because what they tell me has been corroborated so many times, I don't even think about it anymore.

First of all, blind tests have their own huge biases, and anyone trusting them is making a mistake, even if they're fun, and occasionally revealing. When I said in earlier posts that our map of human perception is far from complete, and that we are likely perceiving things which we cannot fully explain, that leads to a simple solution, just take the time to listen, both casually, and carefully. Differences in sound quality often reveal themselves over time, although sometimes they're evident immediately. What you might not notice in twenty minutes of paying attention, you might become highly aware of a few days on, and once noticed, if it's something negative, that's all you notice, like a spot on the front of a clean white shirt.

So, Art Dudley's warm and humorous, well written article is some old guy's fantasy, and he's fooling himself into thinking he hears improvements? I read the article, and it sure seems rational, healthily skeptical, but perfectly clear, his sound improved with the PS Audio outlets. My sound improved when I switched from basic cable to some other, more costly brands. Well, it's not a huge surprise that sometimes you get what you pay for. The same logic Art used in his article applies to speaker cable.

Ethan, my good friend Michael Fremer from Stereophile might have a thing or two to say differently about lamp cord being as good as anything else, I imagine you're acquainted with him.

I apologize, I don't have enough time right now to watch the entire video, but in the first minute, the speaker begins with a discussion of the "human perceptual system", and that's one of my issues with these debates, I am absolutely certain we are barely touching the surface with the science we have today. I hear what I hear, if you hear differently, fine, but please don't tell me I'm wrong about my perceptions, I knew better four decades ago.

* Y'now, it's funny, but I vaguely remember testing out brand new high quality lamp cord ages ago, I was motivated to save some money setting up a home theater system with long cable runs. They sounded quite crappy. I popped for something basic, I think Tributaries cord, opaque blue color if I recall, not crazy expensive, but not dirt cheap, and it smoked the lamp cord. If I knew of a musician or an industry pro who couldn't hear the improvment when I switched them out, I'd have to conclude they're in the wrong business.

Might be a bit of overreaction. I don't believe Ethan was even addressing anything you posted.

"Might be a bit of overreaction. I don't believe Ethan was even addressing anything you posted."

Apologies to the guys and Ethan if I did overreact, I've been through this same debate so many times, I'm weary of it. There are lots and lots of papers published on power cords and speaker wire, and honestly, it's not my field of expertise, so I don't have proof or at least a good theory handy. Give me a little time, and I'll see what I can dig up.

What got to me regarding Ethan's post was it felt like a declaration, "this is simple", this is the way it is, period, end of discussion. It didn't seem to take into account all that we'd discussed in the previous five pages.  After a lifetime of making a living full time as a musician, and having had some rather unique audio experiences, (a few of them award winning), which I try to share and make fun for all my fellow gear heads, that felt dismissive. If it was that simple, there wouldn't be volumes of discussion about it.

Somehow, anytime someone says they hear a change in sound quality when changing power cords or speaker wire, someone else always comes right along to tell them they're mistaken, and that makes no sense. Even statistically, it doesn't make sense. Millions of music loving audiophiles and producers are wrong, the scientists are right, and we're all under the placebo's spell. I bet if you dig deep enough, the scientists have differing opinions too. My reaction has been consistent since I was fifteen. The pleasure of having a well chosen stereo system has been a blessing in my life, and in my experience, which is not small, those pesky power cords and cables have been an important ingredient in those systems, why that bugs some people out escapes me. I haven't seen a jaw yet, that didn't drop the first time I put a record on my turntable for them.

You can never prove a negative statement.

"Listeners will not be able to tell the difference between different cables with the resistance and inductance and capacitance values that would not affect the audible range" would be such a statement.

If you can set up a test that can measure the soundness of this statement, you will have revolutionized the theory and philosophy of science, and you will probably win a nobel prize. So either the people who set up these "prove them wrong" listening tests are very dumb, or they are very brilliant.

But! - As long as there is sound empirical and theoretical proof that there is no difference in the cable variable, based on sound theory, based on sound hypothesis, there is no reason to get into a debate.

For the statement "These 3 feet of cable make a difference (even outside these inductance, resistance and capacitance variables)", you simply design a test and prove it. Until then, such a statement is religious in nature and can be ignored in a scientific context - even when appeals to personal experience and/or authority are presented.

Gustav

Honestly, I still have to wonder about other effects around humans that cause small changes in perception. Yawning or chewing might clear the Eustachian tubes a bit and cause a bit more bass effect. Small changes in head tilt might do the same. Is the amp warm or cold? It's also been proven that using other senses can cause other senses to be less.. sensitive. If the room is bright and there is lots to look at, your hearing will be affected, etc.

I think even the smallest changes in ourselves and surroundings can make large effects on our perception. Simply being happy that you received a postal package with a long-awaited power cord can put you in a much happier state of mind and therefor you'll be more receptive to believing that your money didn't go to waste, and so forth.

I think once you get beyond "good enough" there is truly nothing to be gained, and good enough is usually obtained by applying proper physics ideals to your setup rather than spending money.