Power Cable Tech Talk and a little help for Amir at Audio Science Review

hey everybody welcome back today we've got probably a little bit longer video than I normally do but I'm going to try to put a lot of information into this one this is more of a tech talk Style video we're going to talk about power cables we're going to talk about some of the misinformation out there on power cables and misinformation that's been posted about our power cables out there on YouTube and then we're going to talk about how to set a system up that will allow you to hear the differences that power cables bring to the table and how you can repeatably get results and make good comparisons and make judgments on your own as to whether or not it's going to make a difference in your system and how much difference will it make in your system so we're going to go through a lot here so I'm going to back up I'm going to lay a little bit of groundwork go back to um some earlier emails not emails earlier videos that I shot to where I talk about cables and then when I would do that sometimes the guys over on the left the guys at ARS ASR ASR would post a rebuttal video it's like they they hate me over there because I'm teaching you guys how you can hear differences in cables and what differences there are in cables like power cables speaker cables interconnects USB cables you know everything matters even getting the cables up off the floor and they hate all of that those are the guys that um think that all cables sound the same if they don't measure any difference they can't possibly sound any different and all that stuff and I know we've made fun of those guys in the past or we've kidded about those guys we've called them flat earthers and things like that all in good fun and customers sent me cubicle Globes and Earth is not flat t-shirts and Amir who's the guy that does the measuring and stuff over there at ASR got him one of those t-shirts too and he wore it in one of the last videos about something my buyer power cables and but there's a misunderstanding is why why we call those guys Flat Earth guys um the the real reason is they are like those people and that they have a belief they believe that all cables sound the same and they don't want to do any science or show do any comparatives that might burst their belief system it's kind of like the guys who believe the Earth is flat they don't want to hear any evidence to the contrary so they're kind of they have a belief system and that's it and they won't do any they won't do any science and so those guys are kind of the same way and we've kitted around and called them flat earthers and all that stuff so that's where that stuff came from today we're not going to do that I'm not going to make fun of those guys that's not what this video is about I'm going to help those guys and help you hopefully all of you watching understand all of this stuff and we're going to go right back to some of those videos and we're going to debunk some of that stuff using just some common sense because some of it was just crazy and so um let's go back um I did some videos where I said that the power cables especially can give off electromagnetic interference I mean there's power running through these things it's it's got quite an Emi field and if you have speaker cables or interconnects or something and you've got that stuff all bundled together and you've got them all next to each other with electromagnetic interference from one to the other is going to affect the signal and when it affects the signal it's going to affect how things sound and that is something that is well known in the industry we know that um that one cable can affect the other if you put them next to each other in fact if you go to all the guys that install ethernet cables and stuff for internet through your house they know they don't want to run that ethernet cable alongside a power cable because it's going to affect the signal even though that's an all Digital Signal it's going to put noise on that line and then when that Digital Signal has to be converted at the other end there's noise all over and it's going to affect it and they know if if they're installing cables for DirecTV or Dish TV or you've got video signals run or you're running a cable through the ceiling from your projector to your Source you don't run that stuff next to power cables that's just a known fact in the industry you know especially you don't ever want to run them through the same conduit you want them separated you want some space between them so that they don't affect each other that's a given even in Mir admitted that all these cables have a field around them they give off some electromagnetic interference everything in the world has noise so I told everybody to separate your cables I said get your cables off of each other don't bundle them together don't run them alongside each other go ahead and separate them and get them apart so that you won't have that interference and after I after I did that video I had a lot of people either comment in the video or shoot me emails and say wow that was that was great advice I went and did that and my system sounds better now it sounds clearer and it was free I didn't have to do anything it was great thank you thank you thank you got lots of thank yous on that stuff so a mirror shot a video where he wanted to prove that the electromagnetic interference off of the power cables was negligible or nothing and it wasn't going to affect anything that you put by it so he shot a video and he plugged this into the wall and he didn't plug this into anything he just left it hanging and so he was sticking cables next to it all along it and trying to measure the effect and he wasn't getting any effect of course he was saying see this proves that this doesn't have any effect blah blah blah and everybody who knows anything realizes that if you don't plug it into anything you don't have any current flowing through it then you're not really creating a Dodge electromagnetic interference from it because you don't have any current going through there so he took a lot of flack over that people laughed at him people made fun of them people were sending me emails saying you got to see this you got to see this can't believe what this guy's doing and um I I actually shot a video of a response and I mentioned that stuff in there and I didn't want to point out who he was I didn't want to point the finger at him I didn't want everybody to go look and laugh at Amir and so I just made up a name I just made up the name Mo I just said I got any mo and I didn't I didn't say who it was um and so then Ron my editor ran with that and he made a thumbnail it was hilarious and it had the Three Stooges on it and and everybody had then immediately figured out it was a mirror and everybody was laughing in the mirror call him a stooge and I thought wow this went this went too far you know this isn't what this was about I'm not here to make fun of a mirror and I didn't want to draw attention to him to begin with that's why I just made up a different name and I felt bad about that and I told Ron I said you know what I want to just take that video down it was a good video there was a lot of information in there was reinformative but that wasn't my intent and I told him to take it down and I shot a new video they talked about that situation and I apologize to Amir because the intent was not to make fun of them so I'm going to try and stick with that I'm not going to make fun of him and um following that a mirror kind of doubled down and he posted another video where he said see there really is you know some electromagnetic interference coming off of this thing and he took a circuit tester and he moved the tester to it and of course the the circuit tester would go off when he got near it and it was showing that it was live I mean anybody can take little circuit testers and use those to to find out if a a line is live or not the one he's using all it's really doing is it's it's sensing the capacitance that's in the cable and it's letting you know that it's live it's not showing that there's electromagnetic interference coming off of it or that's doing something so I'm not really sure what what this you know what he's thinking was on that he was at this point trying to prove that there was a measurable interference coming off of it and he admitted that all cables have some interference coming off of them if you've designed any audio equipment you know how bad these things can be you know you get an AC cable next to some sensitive input signal on Boom you know it picks up that but before he was trying to convince everybody that there wasn't so I don't know where he was going with any of that so that's kind of some of the background on some of this and then he ordered a cable from us and we saw the order come in from a mirror for a four foot B24 power cable and we laughed about it at the at the shop and said I bet he doesn't burn it in because they require about 200 hours of bird in and we tell everybody uh that it needs burning I think it's even on our website that you need to burn it in and yes it does have an effect I know the guys over on the left there those those guys we called Flat earthers they don't believe that any cables burn in but fact is a dielectric material has an effect on the electricity and it has to form and dielectric materials have different dielectric absorption ratings and things like that those are known issues and it does change over time and kind of settle in so we thought maybe we should write him a note but we thought no he's just going to refute that that's even a real thing anyway and we thought about writing a note and telling to be sure and plug this end into something when you tests it but we didn't we just we just sent it out and we we joked about it and we knew there was a hit job coming and we were writing the script in our heads we're saying this is what's going to happen this is this is how this is going to turn out and we were laughing about it and we didn't we didn't really care I know he's going to try and do a hit on it but we didn't really feel like anybody's really watching this you know it's it's a low percentage of people that are out there watching a mirror and it really doesn't affect ourselves no big deal so I did this video I didn't really care but as time went on we've got more and more people that are saying hey I saw this video and and there was a lot of misinformation on there and so I feel like it's best if if we go back and touch on those things and correct some stuff and make it a talk Style video and let's let's talk about the technical things and look at what was done in the video so that we can confirm what's really happening and kind of debunk the myths and so the first thing that he did was he talked for quite a bit of time about how much longer the ground plug is than the other plugs it's some to him it seemed like it was just way too long but the truth is that with any high-end power cable the ground plug is always longer that's just a simple fact and the reason so is when you plug this thing in what they want is for the first thing that makes contact is the ground plug you want it to be grounded before it makes any contact with power and when you unplug it you want the opposite you want it to disconnect from the power and then disconnect from the ground so on any high-end power cables the ground is always longer now he had a tough time getting this plugged into his plug and granted with some of the higher end power cables some of these are slightly thicker and that's to help hold them when you put it into a plug you want something that really holds well they are a little bit thicker and plugs are different like from this pass and Seymour plug here to you if you go to Lowe's or Home Depot and you get the orange ones that are hospital grade what the hospital grade ones are is it's it's got more tension on whatever you plug into to hold it so that whatever you plug in doesn't fall out same with some of these that Dave uses is Uber bus these real high inferior Tech plugs they have a little more or hold and they're a little it's a little stiffer sliding this thing in so it didn't surprise me when he says it was hard to plug something in but then he said he noticed as he was plugging it in and plugging it in and back and forth that it was that it was it was putting scratches on the ends here it was getting scratches so that that became very obvious then he's got corrosion on his plugs he's got something in there that's caused it to crowd it's rough and that rough textured surface is is putting some scratches on this polished copper um what he really need to do is he need to go in and replace his plugs with something that's a better quality plug and all the good plugs what they do is they actually have polished connections on the inside because you want as much surface contact as possible and these are polished as well because it makes a difference on the amount of contact that it's making in there well he had a tough time plugging this thing in so so he just kept pushing on it and what happened was he broke it now what he broke was there's a copper sleeve that goes over this whole thing and it acts as part of the shielding mechanism that copper sleeve is not part of the ground plane and it's part of the recipe that helps make it do what it does well he just shoved it on there until he broke the glue on it and then it was just sliding back and forth he's the only one that's broken one so far now any of you guys if you did have a situation like that where the sleeve has come off send it back to us we'll fix it or you can glue it back on yourself it's it's not that big a deal um of course he went ahead and talked about how thick it was and of course you know the thicker it is obviously the better it's going to be because it's so thick the reason it's thick is we've got this big rope going through the center of it and it's separating the the counter rotating geometry on it so when you when you get this when this cable comes in it's like this it's it's got counter rotating um positiveness and negatives going around it and then we feed that rope through and it opens those up and it causes them to crisscross in a higher angle and it decreases the capacitance of the cable it helps reduce noise further and it sounds better then we feed a ground wire through the center of the copper rope through the cotton rope and that's how these things are made and that's the reason they're as big as they are and a little bit stiff there's a there's a lot there for it so that's the those aspects of it you know I'd also like to say that I don't always disagree with a mirror a mirror brings up some good points sometimes and I do agree with him on some things I can mentioned before that just because you're an engineer doesn't mean you understand all this and frankly if an engineer sometimes don't understand this you know we get taught all this stuff in school with no connection to reality and he's correct you know just because you went to college and you passed all your courses and you got your certificate at the end that says you you've you've graduated here's your diploma that doesn't Trump someone who's spent years in a field actually learning and has practical experience practical experience is always something that's going to be at a higher level than someone who just got a college degree that's not the same thing so I agree with Amir on that situation but there's still he had some misunderstandings and he didn't understand why we would take a cable that's this big that's um that breaks down to about an eight gauge cable why would we recommend putting this on the front end gear versus you know versus Power ramps where a power amp is drawn a lot more current so you think well you want bigger cables on your power amps because they're drawing more current and to some degree that's true you know I agree with him on that part most power amps don't draw a lot of current you can get by with our B16 on a lot of power power amps and you may not notice a big difference between the two cables but if you do have a big Power Amp that draws a lot of current then absolutely you know go for the b24s but why are we recommending it on a piece of gear that draws very little current at all and it works at you know millivolts the reason being is there's noise on that AC line when that noise comes in from that AC line and it goes straight to your first thing which may be either your streamer or your DAC that's where your audio signal is transferred from a digital domain to an analog domain and if there is noise on the power supply there's noise in that transformation there that noise is then there and it gets sent onto your preamp and your amp and that noise gets Amplified sometimes the biggest gains can be made when you remove all that noise from your source and then from your preamp and then your amplifier if if the noise isn't there then you don't have that much to amplify but if the noise is already there you've got nothing on your you know on your DAC other than a cheap power cable and it's loaded with AC noise and then it goes to your preamp and then that gets Amplified or it gets sent then to your amps negative it's it's bad news so yeah it makes more difference sometimes and the 24 braid has a bigger larger number of of uh wire going through it there that's a higher filter than our B16 so that's why we recommend that on your front end gear and I know even though we recommended that Amir did not do that he used it on his preamp and so he did some things where he made some recordings he did an audio recording with one power cable and an audio recording with our power cable but just on the preamp and he and he he uploaded those to where you could you could download the file and you could listen to them and I had a lot of emails from people and even some people responded in in the video that said I clearly hear a difference between those two people are emailing me saying hey between those files you just made even though he just used it on his preamp you can hear the difference in the playback and I wish you would have used it maybe on the front end it would have made more difference but it is what it is all right let's talk a little bit about what Amir did in trying to compare some power cables he did what's called null testing and what is what the the concept is was he would take a recording using a regular power cable and then take that same recording using our power cable and then you'll do something where you you flip the polarity on One recording versus the other recording and you'll line that stuff up so that the music then cancels itself out and the difference that's left would be the noise floor that's there that's different between one power cable and the other power cable so we're creating a difference that should be there we're saying yeah there's there's a difference there a noise floor so he sets something up to show what that difference might be however there was quite a bit of flaw in that whole concept and let's back up and talk about where does that come from you know flipping the polarity on something and then re-flipping it that's something that we see in the pro market quite a bit and they figured out originally that whenever they were running long interconnects from the stage to a mixing board and they've got long power cables that are in close proximity to it and things like that those long runs of cable become really big antennas now it's not as big of a problem for us as we're reproducing this stuff in our audio systems because our cables are not that long so they're less of an antenna but they're still an antenna they're still transmitting a lot of noise and it's still a problem even at our level but in the pro market where runs of cable can be 150 200 feet it's a big problem it picks up a lot of noise and it's a known fact that that noise affects the audio signal it affects how it sounds because it's affecting the actual transfer of the signal that you want on there and you've got all this other noise on there that's interfering with it so what they do is they they run what's called a balanced cable and most of you understand how balanced cable Works some of you may not I'm going to explain it really quickly bounce cable has three plugs it's got a ground it's got two legs that are carrying the audio signal and those two legs work like this one has the standard signal just like we would send through a balance I mean a single India cable the other one has that same signal on it but they flip the polarity on it so when they flip the polarity on it it's running out of phase from the other side so it goes down to wherever they're taking and you know 100 and something feet away and it's picked up a lot of noise it it's it's a big antenna and it's picked that stuff up and then when it gets to the other end what they do is they flip that polarity back on one leg and now it's in Phase with the first leg but then the noise that it picked up from point A to point B is now out of phase and that noise cancels itself out now it's not perfect it doesn't cancel out everything I mean you've got two wires there that are side by side and you've got let's say radial frequency interference that it's picking up it's picking up every radio station there is well those wavelengths are really short and some of them arrive at one wire at a slightly different time frame than the other and when you flip them flip the polarity it didn't completely cancel all that stuff out there the two wires are close together but there's still some difference there but you know not a lot but there's still some it's not perfect the other issue with going to balance cable and I don't know a lot of you think well I'll just put bounce cable on my system and and it won't pick up noise well it won't pick up additional noise but noise that's already there noise that's already in your system because maybe you didn't use any good power cables that noise is still being transmitted through both of those lines and it didn't go away so you flip the polarity on it you flip the polarity on that noise then you flip it back and it's still in Phase versus some of our interconnect that we use that has this counter rotating geometry on it it's not working so much as a shield or as uh balance cables but it's working as a filter so what it's doing is the noise that's already on there it's filtering some of that noise out just like what our power cables do just like what some of these cables do that we use as Speaker cables it's working as a filter even a mirror emitted on there that once we do that counter rotating geometry because of the the geometry of it that it becomes a filter yes the weave that they have does provide some some cancellation or you consuming be generation but uh it certainly is doing what it says is doing you know I just want to say what's fair is fair they talk about the geometry and there are science behind that geometry being good for noise so what happened then with this null test why is that null test null and void I know he made you think that it was really sharp it was doing a smart null but the whole thing wasn't smart at all and I'll tell you why and I'm going to tell you in a way to where you can understand it and I'm going to go to the shop and I'm going to show you some noise levels and I'm going to illustrate it and it's going to be a very clear and very evident when you take a recording and it doesn't matter what the power cable was you could use the same cable both times you make a recording and then you make a second recording and then you take those two recordings and you superimpose them on themselves and you flip the polarities on everything you're going to cancel out everything that lines up problem is the noise doesn't line up noise is not constant and it's not the same noise is doing this so you got this noise going on on One recording and you got this noise going on another recording when you flip the polarities on those they don't cancel each other out in fact let's go to the shop and let's look at an illustration and it'll become very clear all right what we're going to do here is we're going to illustrate noise levels and we're going to do so by looking at noise levels in the room so what we have here is I've got the the camera focused on the screen and I'm going to be showing you guys an RTA measurement which is a real-time measurement with the microphone pointed out into the room it's about four feet away from me and pointed out into the room so what we're seeing here is you can see my voice you can see how it's picking up my voice even though it's a directional mic and it's turned completely away from me and if I'm quiet you can see it go back down this is just standard room noise and it's very similar to noise that you're going to get in anything AC noise RF signals all of that it's very random so I'm going to be real quiet for a moment let it settle and then I'm going to capture it all right I've captured one here and I'm going to turn it green so we can see it a little bit better and then we're going to do it again it's randomly moving again again you can see my voice moving it I'm going to get quiet again and let's capture it again all right now let's turn this one red now as you can see not much of it lines up I mean there's some things that are going on there that are on top of each other but if we look there's there's red lines that are going in One Direction and green lines going in another and there are some areas where they line up and then there's a whole bunch of areas where they don't so let's pretend that we just captured all of this in an audio recording we capture the noise level and then we we did another audio recording and capture the noise level again obviously those noise levels are all random and none of them line up so if we flip the polarity on one versus the other try and cancel it out there are some areas like right in here where there's a red line and a green line on each other so that would kind of represent a wavelength that is arriving in phase and then when you flip the polarity it would cancel out but there's a lot of Peaks and things where you've got a red line on one side and then a opposed from it you've got a green Peak on the other those are similar to things that would arrive out of phase so they're out of phase or out of time with each other when they arrive and so when you flip the polarity over on each other what you're going to get is a new Peak because you're going to get one plus one equals two and you're going to get a new Peak somewhere and you're going to get a greater range of noise than you would normally get if you were just looking at a single in other words you could get some of these Peaks that line up after you flip the polarity that become taller than they were to begin with so you're going to get one plus one equal two kind of a situation whereas again some of these areas you'll get cancellation but it's going to look just as rough um after you flip the polarity on it as it does before you fill up the polarity on it and it's possible that by flipping the polarity onto the noise and laying it over on itself you could get a greater range of noise a higher DB range that's just the way it works it's just how random this stuff really is all right hopefully that was fun and that made sense and everybody understands how noise levels are never constant they're not linear they're moving around all the time so you can't do a null test on noise levels you're just going to get more noise and I know when he took that um those captures that he did there he had a pretty big range of level there and you could see in blue there what was representing the noise that was he was picking up but he cropped all that out he only used a 93 DB range so everything that was going on below that he just physically cropped it out and then he he said well let's let's hear if we hear a difference between One recording and another you know and he uploaded the files of course a lot of people said they could hear the difference but he's listening on earbuds and I can tell you now you're you're not going to hear the differences on earbuds like you can if you have a whole system set up and I'm going to come back to that we're going to really talk about that um and then he reversed it on itself and then said now can you hear the difference well they cropped all of it out all the noise level was cropped out so you weren't going to hear anything so that whole test was null and void that was ridiculous uh the other thing he did was he used our power cable as an interconnect like why are you using it on a low power source why don't you plug it into the wall and measure everything that you're picking up on that cable measure all the noise level all the RF noise everything and then do the same with the cheaper cable and see how much difference there is how about that that would be an easy test to do but no use it as an interconnect and even using it as an interconnect he noted that there was a 20 DB difference in noise level between our power cable and the other power cable that he was tested 20 DB in noise level is quite a bit and that's that's using it on interconnect that's not even looking at all the RF noise and the electromagnetic interferences and things that it's designed to actually filter out that you're not even going to see using it as an interconnect but the fact that there's 20 DB difference there is really significant so Amir thank you very much for pointing all that out unfortunately this is where they do know science over there is they've got it they've got some data and then they theorize the result here's where they theorizes the result he says okay that's below the level of what we can normally hear so there's going to be no effect well in order to conclude if there's going to be an effect or not you've got to set something up and actually listen you're going to have to do some comparative listening to know if it's going to have any effect or not so I'm going to help kind of walk you guys through how you can set something up and so that you can definitively hear a difference and you're not going to hear it listen to listen to the differences on earbuds because you're handicapping yourself so much even Amir notice that when people talk about swapping out these power cables like the whole Sound Stage opens up if you look at the uh you know marketing material for a lot of interconnect cables or speaker cables they claim how much noise immunity they have and as a result that opens up the sound and darker backgrounds and all that stuff you know there's more layering there's more space there's more everything of course there is I mean that's some of the differences that it makes when you when you remove a lot of the noise from the AC system there and you now have a clean audio signal it preserves what I call spatial cues it's the things that create the space around instruments and stuff it it preserves the upper level harmonics it preserves the Decay structure that's on each note so it doesn't get smeared and just go away you can actually hear the decay of those notes and you hear space between notes and you hear the difference in spaciousness you're not going to hear differences in Sound Stage layering listen on a pair of earbuds it's just not gonna not gonna happen you may hear differences in some clarity you're going to hear some slight differences but not if not like you will if you put into a big system in a full-size system there you may even hear differences in the vocal region vocals are more fluid fluid and less smeared bass response is tighter cleaner digs deeper and more extended I mean there's a whole lot of differences that this stuff brings to the table when you've got good clean power run into everything so the way to notice this stuff is you have to be able to set up a system that's going to allow you to hear these things in other words you need an audio system that's one going to have good good speakers not speakers loaded with electrolytic capacitors and iron core inductors and sand cast resistors and cabinets that vibrate and you know all those things are going to do away with all that decay structure and all that spatial cues that are there in the music your speaker has to be able to reproduce it it can't be you know a a 200 speaker I mean you're gonna have to you're going to have to have a reasonable quality level there that the speaker is not disrupting the audio signal next you have to have your speakers pulled out into the room you can't cram the speakers up against the wall and expect to create a three-dimensional Sound Stage it's going to reflect right off the wall and it's going to sound as if it's just all coming from the wall that's just a simple physics of it to create a three-dimensional Sound Stage to some degree you're going to have to get your speakers off the wall that reflection off the wall is going to have to be heard and perceived as a delay not as part of the signal um you're going to have to be in a room preferably that's not bare walls if you've got Reflections going on all over the place and those Reflections in the room they're going to disrupt your system's ability to create a sound stage you need a reasonably well-treated room the more the room is treated and the more diffusion and absorption you got in there to where you're not listening like your head's in a barrel then the greater your system is going to be and being able to recreate a three-dimensional Sound Stage that's just simple Bare Bones Basics physics of it whatever you want to call it that's the facts and it it also matters what other cables you're using in your system I mean if you're using the the interconnect that came with your VCR that you bought in the 80s I mean chances are you got a lot of improvement ahead same with speaker cables if you're using zip cord you got a lot of improvement ahead so if you've taken a lot of that stuff into account you've got a properly set up system to where now you can hear a three-dimensional Sound Stage now spend your money on power cables and it's going to be money's well spent you're going to get some of those jaw-dropping responses where you list it and you think oh my goodness the whole sound States just opened up absolutely a veil has been lifted off of everything yep yep that's what happens and you can go back and forth and you can listen and you can get repeatable results easily easily but you have to be able to recreate that stuff when my customers ask me about power cables first thing I do is ask them about their system you know how big is your rim how far your speaker's out of the room how do you have it set up do you have any room treatment in your room you know a lot of people just aren't ready to go down that path of upgrading their cables you know and granted to some degree they'll still benefit from upgrading their speaker cables and things they're going to hear differences in Clarity uh differences in texture and tone and bass response and things like that but where the real differences come in play is in The Sound Stage and how open and how deep and how layered Things Are you're starting to get that from earbuds guys you're going to have to set that system up to where you can hear it and then it's going to make a difference so I hope you guys enjoyed this dive into the technical aspects of this stuff if you got questions shoot them over to me in the email post them below um I always appreciate you guys comments and we'll see you guys in the next one all right oh sorry about that didn't know you were sitting there

Channel: GR-Research

Views: 34,490

Keywords: Tuesday Tech Talk, audiophile, hifi, loudspeaker, fullrange driver, comb filtering, GR-Research, Danny Richie, crossover design, measurements, best loudspeakers, tube amplifier, preamplifier, diy speakers, audiophile speakers, audiophile music, amplifier, best voice, audiophiles, high end, baffle step loss, open baffle, fast bass, subwoofers, line source, drivers, high power handling, low distortion, the room, speaker upgrade, audiophile loudspeakers, crossovers, DIY Audio, soundstage

Id: A286kmaauuQ

Length: 37min 30sec (2250 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2023