Audio Power Cables / Cords - Do they really make a difference?

Speedskater

Speedskater

Audioholic General
:)
..................................
You can run it on a 15a outlet with an adapter, just not anywhere near full power. Up until the point where the 15a breaker trips you will get the same current off a 15a circuit as a 20a...........
Yep....Most people don't realize that the only way a circuit breaker limits current is by tripping.
 
D

Dan Miller

Audiophyte
I started out to say how much I love reading all of the back and forth here, but that didn't really ring true. I sort of, kinda... Well, let's just say I get a chuckle.

First, I want to let everyone know where I am coming from. I have been in this business longer than many of the readers have been alive. Beginning with my discovery of high end (at that time it really meant something) audio in 1972 when at 14 years old I had the totally accidental experience of meeting Saul Marantz and Jon Dahlquist at the world premiere of the DQ-10 loudspeaker. What I heard that day blew my mind-- I was hooked for life and I never looked back. We listened to a recording of Andre Segovia that Saul had made in his living room--he and Andre apparently were pretty tight. I could have sworn that real guitar strings were being plucked... that speaker was pretty amazing. I ended up working for the dealer where this took place. In order to work there we had to attend a live unamplified musical event monthly and make a live recording quarterly, using the owner's Sennheiser condenser mics and a Revox A-77. All of this was just to keep our ears in tune to the sound (and for most of us, the beauty and passion) of live music. 18 years of high end retail followed by 6 years at Sony, 11 at Marantz, several more consulting, and currently doing engineering for high end DLP projectors at Panasonic.

I've always been one to question why. When I asked Saul and Jon that day why what I was hearing was so fundamentally earth shattering for me, they had answers. Lot's of them. And they all made sense. Because here were two very good engineers that were taking a novel approach to improving a somewhat flawed electromechanical design to the limits of what was available at the time. The next revelation didn't come until John Bau introduced the Spica-TC-50. Another paradigm shift, that was backed by SCIENCE. The last one was the Dunlavy SC-IV, that I had demo'd to me by John Dunlavy himself, several decades later, while working for Sony and finding myself in Colorado Springs with several hours to kill, and literally stopping in at Dunlavy Loudspeakers out of the blue and simply hoping to see the place. John ended up spending most of his day with me, just talking about this stuff... those were the days.

I am bringing this up for context. One of the things I learned quickly was that some things I heard didn't make any sense at all, and that drove me nuts. I HAD to figure out why. Tube amplifiers for example. The first Audio Research rig I heard was "night and day" better than anything else I had ever listened to. But when I looked at the specs, it made no sense. The amp started rolling off the highs at around 16k, and had THD in the single digits! But it sounded so damn GOOD, so obviously there must be more to it than what specs can measure, right? I loved spouting that one off to customers-- I really knew what I was talking about. NOT.

It wasn't until listening to a recording that I had made myself and knew intimately, that I realized that the ARC amplifier wasn't as good as I thought. It was DIFFERENT. Really different. But it wasn't what the recording sounded like. Yet, there was something really attractive about the sound, which I soon learned were the even order harmonics. Many people say that's why tubes sound better. Nope. Tubes don't sound better. They are just more fun to listen to. Seriously more fun. But that doesn't make sense either. If accuracy is the goal, then tubes should suck. Same thing for the vinyl vs digital debate (today, not in 1983, when CD players actually hurt to listen to). By the way, the real debate there should be analog vs digital, not vinyl. Compare a 30ips half track master tape to the vinyl that gets cut from it if you don't believe me. I have. Ain't close, even on a SOTA Star Sapphire turntable (science again).

After several decades of getting paid to enjoy my hobby, meeting and spending time with people like Doug Sax, Tom Jung, Jack Renner, etc... here are some of the conclusions I came to.

  • Accuracy is absolutely the goal. It can be measured and quantified. And the more accurate we get, the more we realize how far we have to go. "Better" isn't necessarily more enjoyable, or more emotional involving, because the clearer the window, the more flaws are revealed, and flaws distract. Distractions are bad.
  • Most audiophiles are not music lovers. I apologize to those who are--you know who you are. I sold too much stuff to too many people for way too long, knowing that they should have stopped a long time before. But I have the bug too, so I can empathize to the fullest. "What should I do to my system next?" How about listen to it? Or even better, listen to music?
  • People will hear what they want to hear. This is particularly true of cables. Why cables? I don't know, except that they cost so damn much relative to what they are, that they better sound good. I had the opportunity to meet Frank Van Alstine at a CES show shortly after he had written an article crucifying cables. Now there was some passion. What he said still rings true today. "If a cable makes a difference, something is wrong" Which leads me to...
  • To most audiophiles, "different" means "better." But is it really? Make a change, hear a difference. Should be good, right? Not without a reference. And here is where the rubber meets the road...
  • It is OK to say, "I like the sound better." But don't ever say, "It is better sounding," unless you are prepared to prove it. And double blind, or triple blind listening doesn't prove anything, unless you are comparing it to a reference. And very few of us can do that. Because the reference is the original event.
  • We will probably never be able to truly and accurately reproduce the experience of live music. It is way too hard. I was fooling around with a buddy of mine at Carnegie Mellon University sometime in the late 70s and was snapping my fingers in front of a lab microphone connected to a seriously fast scope. We froze the waveform and I realized that we had a long way to go. From about 1 foot away, a finger snap created a peak SPL of over 122 dB! It was brief, lasting less than 1 ms.. If you don't believe me, hold your hand about a foot away from your ears and snap your fingers ten times or so. Bet your ears will be ringing. And this is just your fingers and friction. Imagine the peak dynamics of a rimshot. Dynamics and microdynamics are what makes live sound live. And even around the corner or down the block, you can always tell. This is why horns, for all of their tonal flaws, can be so convincing. But we don't even have a method to capture anywhere near the totality of the experience that is live music. We would need an easy 150dB of dynamic range in both capture and playback to do justice to the real dynamics of live. And let's assume that there was a loudspeaker that could do it, and for argument's sake we will give this mythical speaker a sensitivity of 95 dB/1W/1m. Assuming you could supply the power, and the speaker could take the power, to deliver 150dB instantaneous peaks (like the finger snap, rimshot, etc...) would require instantaneous power delivery of over 260 THOUSAND Watts. Ain't gonna happen. So we compromise.
  • To anyone who spends lots of money on cables: If you haven't spent at least as much as what your speakers cost to fix your room, you are wasting money. You want night and day? Fix your room. Get yourself a copy of the Stereophile Test CD Volume 2, and learn how to use the Music Articulation Test Tone (read Feb 2000 Stereophile for an explanation of MATT) HUGE. Get a second subwoofer and spend a month or so finding the best spot for both of them. HUGE. Learn to live with a butt ugly room that has one of the two subs somewhere out in the room, maybe a foot or so from the wall, because when you listen to Jaco Pastorius, not only can you hear and feel the bass, you will experience a little of his soul. Because if your system can't give you goosebumps with the right music, cables aren't the answer.
  • Even if only half of my conclusions are right, paying money for a fancy POWER CABLE? Give me a break. Not only does that power go sometimes hundreds of miles before it gets to your house (as many of you have rightfully pointed out), it goes through ALUMINUM conductors! And bunches of step-up and step-down transformers. Compared to that, the Romex in your walls is like six-nines copper. But... people will hear what they want to hear. So to you, here is the test. Put your money where your mouth is. Because I would bet a month's salary that you can't hear the difference. 50 separate tries. Your system. Your house. You leave. I will connect your fancy schmancy cables OR... one of Kurt's Blue Jeans Cables. You come back. Listen. As long as you like. Write down which you think it is. Then you leave again. Repeat. Statistically, you could get 50% if you were completely deaf and guessed. If you were lucky you could guess and get 30 out of 50. But from what I have read here, everyone can hear the difference. So you get over 40 out of 50, you win. If they really make that kind of difference, then it should be like taking candy from a baby. So you gotta ask yourself, Do I feel lucky?
Sorry for the long winded rant. I was looking to see what BJC had to say about Cat6a cables, because I'm rewiring and I want to do it right, and i stumbled across this thread. It just made me feel like writing.

Final funny story. When I first discovered the MATT (see above), I stopped at the Stereophile booth at CEDIA to buy one. I was asked, "Fresh or Frozen?" Huh? They told me that if you cryogenically treat your CD's in liquid nitrogen, they sound better. Personally, I wondered what would happen to the green ink on the edges... I bought it fresh, thank you. A couple of months later I was visiting one of my dealers in Melbourne Florida. One of their customers was there and was wearing a NASA windbreaker. We started talking, geek stuff mostly. I found out he was a thermodynamic engineer out at the cape. So I asked him about the freezing thing. He laughed because he had read it as well. And tried it. And heard a difference. So he decided to find out why. As it turns out, because the coefficient of expansion/contraction is different for the plastic and the aluminium substrate of the disc, separation occurs and microfractures form in the plastic. Your eyes can't see them, but the error correction of the disc player absolutely can and it goes into overdrive while playing the disc. Thus, you hear a difference. And since you paid 5$ more to have someone essentially ruin your disc, it better sound better.
 
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haraldo

haraldo

Audioholic Spartan
If there is an award for 'the post of the year' this must be it!
This post should be pinned, starred, framed, made complementary reading to anyone interested in music.

Thx Dan for a sensationally interesting read :p
I have always been drooling for those big Dunlavys, but never managed to audition them...
 
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N

nickwin

Junior Audioholic
Fantastic post. It summed up my own thoughts better than I could have myself.
 
A

Arthur Chandler

Audiophyte
Well, I'm glad I didn't ruin any disks! I did buy some gold MFSL ones though and wondered if I was out of my mind. Great post....we all hear differences, but that's really all they are and what you bring to the table on that day/at that moment counts. It counts because music is also about how you react to it. So listening should be goosebumps and fun, not too exacting or stressful looking for criticisms. Maybe that's why measurements sometimes come up short.
I'm curious what cables you might use, Dan?
 
D

Dan Miller

Audiophyte
It is more, what don't I use? The cheap ones that things are packaged with.

Being in the business I have amassed so many cables over the years... "Here, try these out..."

However, in my current system I am using BJC HDMI. The thick stuff. System is all digital because it is my living room projector for the family. 18 TB HTPC with all of my flac music and ripped BD and TiVO for cable card and streaming. Marantz 7008 connected with ethereal 13 GA speaker cable to Snell 1900 THX system and a 3-chip DLP.
 
D

Dan Miller

Audiophyte
If there is an award for 'the post of the year' this must be it!
This post should be pinned, starred, framed, made complementary reading to anyone interested in music.

Thx Dan for a sensationally interesting read :p
I have always been drooling for those big Dunlavys, but never managed to audition them...
Meeting John Dunlavy was very cool. It was as if he had nothing better to do than spend his entire day with me. At one point we spent about 15 minutes in his huge anechoic chamber. He was 4 feet away and we both had to speak loudly to be heard. Very weird what your body does without those audible cues... Another thing he did while I was listening to the big boys... he came up from behind me and dropped a set of Sony studio headphones over my ears, and aside from the imaging collapsing, the tonal balance and articulation was identical. That was impressive.
 
haraldo

haraldo

Audioholic Spartan
Meeting John Dunlavy was very cool. It was as if he had nothing better to do than spend his entire day with me. At one point we spent about 15 minutes in his huge anechoic chamber. He was 4 feet away and we both had to speak loudly to be heard. Very weird what your body does without those audible cues... Another thing he did while I was listening to the big boys... he came up from behind me and dropped a set of Sony studio headphones over my ears, and aside from the imaging collapsing, the tonal balance and articulation was identical. That was impressive.
John Dunlavy's dedication to speaker design was beyound comprehension... I read somewhere just the amount of time he spent on internal cabinet geometry and selection of damping material for the SC-IV, only this was a major project as I understand, that took more than a year.... I don't know if there are people like him anymore around?
 
gene

gene

Audioholics Master Chief
Administrator
I started out to say how much I love reading all of the back and forth here, but that didn't really ring true. I sort of, kinda... Well, let's just say I get a chuckle.

First, I want to let everyone know where I am coming from. I have been in this business longer than many of the readers have been alive. Beginning with my discovery of high end (at that time it really meant something) audio in 1972 when at 14 years old I had the totally accidental experience of meeting Saul Marantz and Jon Dahlquist at the world premiere of the DQ-10 loudspeaker. What I heard that day blew my mind-- I was hooked for life and I never looked back. We listened to a recording of Andre Segovia that Saul had made in his living room--he and Andre apparently were pretty tight. I could have sworn that real guitar strings were being plucked... that speaker was pretty amazing. I ended up working for the dealer where this took place. In order to work there we had to attend a live unamplified musical event monthly and make a live recording quarterly, using the owner's Sennheiser condenser mics and a Revox A-77. All of this was just to keep our ears in tune to the sound (and for most of us, the beauty and passion) of live music. 18 years of high end retail followed by 6 years at Sony, 11 at Marantz, several more consulting, and currently doing engineering for high end DLP projectors at Panasonic.

I've always been one to question why. When I asked Saul and Jon that day why what I was hearing was so fundamentally earth shattering for me, they had answers. Lot's of them. And they all made sense. Because here were two very good engineers that were taking a novel approach to improving a somewhat flawed electromechanical design to the limits of what was available at the time. The next revelation didn't come until John Bau introduced the Spica-TC-50. Another paradigm shift, that was backed by SCIENCE. The last one was the Dunlavy SC-IV, that I had demo'd to me by John Dunlavy himself, several decades later, while working for Sony and finding myself in Colorado Springs with several hours to kill, and literally stopping in at Dunlavy Loudspeakers out of the blue and simply hoping to see the place. John ended up spending most of his day with me, just talking about this stuff... those were the days.

I am bringing this up for context. One of the things I learned quickly was that some things I heard didn't make any sense at all, and that drove me nuts. I HAD to figure out why. Tube amplifiers for example. The first Audio Research rig I heard was "night and day" better than anything else I had ever listened to. But when I looked at the specs, it made no sense. The amp started rolling off the highs at around 16k, and had THD in the single digits! But it sounded so damn GOOD, so obviously there must be more to it than what specs can measure, right? I loved spouting that one off to customers-- I really knew what I was talking about. NOT.

It wasn't until listening to a recording that I had made myself and knew intimately, that I realized that the ARC amplifier wasn't as good as I thought. It was DIFFERENT. Really different. But it wasn't what the recording sounded like. Yet, there was something really attractive about the sound, which I soon learned were the even order harmonics. Many people say that's why tubes sound better. Nope. Tubes don't sound better. They are just more fun to listen to. Seriously more fun. But that doesn't make sense either. If accuracy is the goal, then tubes should suck. Same thing for the vinyl vs digital debate (today, not in 1983, when CD players actually hurt to listen to). By the way, the real debate there should be analog vs digital, not vinyl. Compare a 30ips half track master tape to the vinyl that gets cut from it if you don't believe me. I have. Ain't close, even on a SOTA Star Sapphire turntable (science again).

After several decades of getting paid to enjoy my hobby, meeting and spending time with people like Doug Sax, Tom Jung, Jack Renner, etc... here are some of the conclusions I came to.

  • Accuracy is absolutely the goal. It can be measured and quantified. And the more accurate we get, the more we realize how far we have to go. "Better" isn't necessarily more enjoyable, or more emotional involving, because the clearer the window, the more flaws are revealed, and flaws distract. Distractions are bad.
  • Most audiophiles are not music lovers. I apologize to those who are--you know who you are. I sold too much stuff to too many people for way too long, knowing that they should have stopped a long time before. But I have the bug too, so I can empathize to the fullest. "What should I do to my system next?" How about listen to it? Or even better, listen to music?
  • People will hear what they want to hear. This is particularly true of cables. Why cables? I don't know, except that they cost so damn much relative to what they are, that they better sound good. I had the opportunity to meet Frank Van Alstine at a CES show shortly after he had written an article crucifying cables. Now there was some passion. What he said still rings true today. "If a cable makes a difference, something is wrong" Which leads me to...
  • To most audiophiles, "different" means "better." But is it really? Make a change, hear a difference. Should be good, right? Not without a reference. And here is where the rubber meets the road...
  • It is OK to say, "I like the sound better." But don't ever say, "It is better sounding," unless you are prepared to prove it. And double blind, or triple blind listening doesn't prove anything, unless you are comparing it to a reference. And very few of us can do that. Because the reference is the original event.
  • We will probably never be able to truly and accurately reproduce the experience of live music. It is way too hard. I was fooling around with a buddy of mine at Carnegie Mellon University sometime in the late 70s and was snapping my fingers in front of a lab microphone connected to a seriously fast scope. We froze the waveform and I realized that we had a long way to go. From about 1 foot away, a finger snap created a peak SPL of over 122 dB! It was brief, lasting less than 1 ms.. If you don't believe me, hold your hand about a foot away from your ears and snap your fingers ten times or so. Bet your ears will be ringing. And this is just your fingers and friction. Imagine the peak dynamics of a rimshot. Dynamics and microdynamics are what makes live sound live. And even around the corner or down the block, you can always tell. This is why horns, for all of their tonal flaws, can be so convincing. But we don't even have a method to capture anywhere near the totality of the experience that is live music. We would need an easy 150dB of dynamic range in both capture and playback to do justice to the real dynamics of live. And let's assume that there was a loudspeaker that could do it, and for argument's sake we will give this mythical speaker a sensitivity of 95 dB/1W/1m. Assuming you could supply the power, and the speaker could take the power, to deliver 150dB instantaneous peaks (like the finger snap, rimshot, etc...) would require instantaneous power delivery of over 260 THOUSAND Watts. Ain't gonna happen. So we compromise.
  • To anyone who spends lots of money on cables: If you haven't spent at least as much as what your speakers cost to fix your room, you are wasting money. You want night and day? Fix your room. Get yourself a copy of the Stereophile Test CD Volume 2, and learn how to use the Music Articulation Test Tone (read Feb 2000 Stereophile for an explanation of MATT) HUGE. Get a second subwoofer and spend a month or so finding the best spot for both of them. HUGE. Learn to live with a butt ugly room that has one of the two subs somewhere out in the room, maybe a foot or so from the wall, because when you listen to Jaco Pastorius, not only can you hear and feel the bass, you will experience a little of his soul. Because if your system can't give you goosebumps with the right music, cables aren't the answer.
  • Even if only half of my conclusions are right, paying money for a fancy POWER CABLE? Give me a break. Not only does that power go sometimes hundreds of miles before it gets to your house (as many of you have rightfully pointed out), it goes through ALUMINUM conductors! And bunches of step-up and step-down transformers. Compared to that, the Romex in your walls is like six-nines copper. But... people will hear what they want to hear. So to you, here is the test. Put your money where your mouth is. Because I would bet a month's salary that you can't hear the difference. 50 separate tries. Your system. Your house. You leave. I will connect your fancy schmancy cables OR... one of Kurt's Blue Jeans Cables. You come back. Listen. As long as you like. Write down which you think it is. Then you leave again. Repeat. Statistically, you could get 50% if you were completely deaf and guessed. If you were lucky you could guess and get 30 out of 50. But from what I have read here, everyone can hear the difference. So you get over 40 out of 50, you win. If they really make that kind of difference, then it should be like taking candy from a baby. So you gotta ask yourself, Do I feel lucky?
Sorry for the long winded rant. I was looking to see what BJC had to say about Cat6a cables, because I'm rewiring and I want to do it right, and i stumbled across this thread. It just made me feel like writing.

Final funny story. When I first discovered the MATT (see above), I stopped at the Stereophile booth at CEDIA to buy one. I was asked, "Fresh or Frozen?" Huh? They told me that if you cryogenically treat your CD's in liquid nitrogen, they sound better. Personally, I wondered what would happen to the green ink on the edges... I bought it fresh, thank you. A couple of months later I was visiting one of my dealers in Melbourne Florida. One of their customers was there and was wearing a NASA windbreaker. We started talking, geek stuff mostly. I found out he was a thermodynamic engineer out at the cape. So I asked him about the freezing thing. He laughed because he had read it as well. And tried it. And heard a difference. So he decided to find out why. As it turns out, because the coefficient of expansion/contraction is different for the plastic and the aluminium substrate of the disc, separation occurs and microfractures form in the plastic. Your eyes can't see them, but the error correction of the disc player absolutely can and it goes into overdrive while playing the disc. Thus, you hear a difference. And since you paid 5$ more to have someone essentially ruin your disc, it better sound better.
Dan welcome to our forum. It's nice to get seasoned folks like yourself here into the discussions. I enjoyed reading your post and if your interested into formalizing it into an editorial for the site, please feel free to PM or email me at: gds@audioholics.com

You may enjoy this editorial I wrote many years ago that touches on some of your points in your post:
http://www.audioholics.com/editorials/the-dumbing-down-of-audio

thanks.
 
haraldo

haraldo

Audioholic Spartan
Meeting John Dunlavy was very cool. It was as if he had nothing better to do than spend his entire day with me. At one point we spent about 15 minutes in his huge anechoic chamber. He was 4 feet away and we both had to speak loudly to be heard. Very weird what your body does without those audible cues... Another thing he did while I was listening to the big boys... he came up from behind me and dropped a set of Sony studio headphones over my ears, and aside from the imaging collapsing, the tonal balance and articulation was identical. That was impressive.
Dan, From my point of view, it would be very interesting to hear from you, anything... about John Dunlavy. I have read everything I possibly can come across about John Dunlavy, whether it be reviews of his speakers, interviews, Stereophile has written quite a bit about him, and it seems like every article about John Dunlavy has some reveleations... It seems like every piece of information that comes from Dunlavy contains marvels or is like a goldmine of speaker design facts... Please share whatever you may have, plz :p

To me Dunlavy was the master of masters...
 
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Johnny2Bad

Johnny2Bad

Audioholic Chief
Almost any change in a system configuration or equipment "can make a difference". I don't feel the need to tell people what they should or should not use in their system, but any time there is noise on the power side of any component, it will show up on the output.

Whether this or that AC power cord will result in an improvement, a detriment, or no change at all, is almost certainly extremely system-dependent ... you can measure power line harmonics at two adjacent homes and see a difference, let alone two systems owned by two members of a forum, living thousands of miles apart. Any cable is capable of picking up radiated radio waves, and that will potentially add noise to the system, for starters.

However, I invite anyone to check out a set of reviews in the Bible of Subjective Reviewing ... Stereophile magazine. Every full review lists "Asssociated Equipment" and under the category "Cables" there is a listing of Power Cords under "AC".

You would expect that every review would list a set of exotic power cables, especially since the magazine is in the business of reviewing them, plus reviewers often obtain cables at no charge (manufacturers typically don't ask for cables to be returned after a review). Notice how many times you see "Manufacturer's Own" ... in other words whatever came in the box, and note that it's the Power Cable that came in the box of every component, not just the unit under review. Feel free to come to your own conclusions.
 
J

Jaybeez

Junior Audioholic
Dan's post made my weekend.

I spend enough on cables to get those that look cool and aren't stiff.

I have 12 broadband panels and 4 bass traps in my listening space, and wouldn't trade that treatment for a full set of high end cables from any manufacturer.
 
haraldo

haraldo

Audioholic Spartan
Dan's post made my weekend.

I spend enough on cables to get those that look cool and aren't stiff.

I have 12 broadband panels and 4 bass traps in my listening space, and wouldn't trade that treatment for a full set of high end cables from any manufacturer.
Which panels and traps are you using?
 
haraldo

haraldo

Audioholic Spartan
Here's an article and a statement from a guy who has been profound anti-cable all his life and all his life has been using dirt-cheap cables... I am not taking any sides, just referring to this article:

Here's what he writes about changing one single power cable, do you guys suggest this is all imagination?
Before putting the Valhalla 2 in I played a few songs using the Red Dawn power cord so I could get an idea of the sound qualities. When I put in the Valhalla 2 it was a shocker. Not only was there a huge difference in the sound, I preferred it to even the ODIN power cable! The vocals once again were cleared up and fattened up. They were more into my room and more 3D with literally NO haze or fog. Sounds were popping out from space all around the room. The slight dullness and flatness of the Red Dawn power cord was gone. Now the sound was full of life and realism.

http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/nordost-valhalla-2-the-importance-of-cables-in-high-end-audio/



What if some of you guys in AH did the same, change one single cable in a pre or power amp to a Valhalla 2 Power cable, and then listen to see what you would experience. I am sure Nordost would kindly borrow it to you :p
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Here's an article and a statement from a guy who has been profound anti-cable all his life and all his life has been using dirt-cheap cables... I am not taking any sides, just referring to this article:

Here's what he writes about changing one single power cable, do you guys suggest this is all imagination?
Before putting the Valhalla 2 in I played a few songs using the Red Dawn power cord so I could get an idea of the sound qualities. When I put in the Valhalla 2 it was a shocker. Not only was there a huge difference in the sound, I preferred it to even the ODIN power cable! The vocals once again were cleared up and fattened up. They were more into my room and more 3D with literally NO haze or fog. Sounds were popping out from space all around the room. The slight dullness and flatness of the Red Dawn power cord was gone. Now the sound was full of life and realism.

http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/nordost-valhalla-2-the-importance-of-cables-in-high-end-audio/



What if some of you guys in AH did the same, change one single cable in a pre or power amp to a Valhalla 2 Power cable, and then listen to see what you would experience. I am sure Nordost would kindly borrow it to you :p
This guy sounds like a nut....why would I take what he blogs seriously?
 

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