At the risk of sounding snobbish. I am really only trying to help people here. You will never get that kind of soundstage if you don't respect your AC in. And by that i mean no stock power cords and good quality AC conditioned delivery.
Especially on your source, power cords are paramount. Good cords will not antennae hash and they will improve timing out your dac or cd over stock. Puting a stock cabled on the power amp nerfed it but it wasnt a noise issue.
I find it very sad that people miss out on this because they are so reliant on what they read on the net. All these posts rejecting power cords do nothing but wreck people's hobby.
Its really sad to me that i hear all these negative posts regarding power cords. They are so important !!!!
Agreed!!
Here is an excerpt from an excellent post by Clay quoting a friend (who chooses to remain anonymous) on the problems of sources of noise on the typical home electrical circuits. Switching power supplies (computers, etc),fans, light dimmers, noise from other circuits spreading to the circuit your gear is on.
Dedicated circuits, power conditioners, cords, regenerators, etc are used. Alan Maher has some products that make no sense at all ( at least to me) but work wonders on the soundstage, tone, and realism of the music.
Its all about the results.
Here's the excerpt from "AC Primer" post from CA:"The power system in your house is really, really complicated. It may not look it, but it is. It is not only the delivery mechanism for 60 Hz power (50 Hz in many parts of the world), but also is an unwitting connection system between everything plugged into it.
For now, we’ll entirely ignore the radiative aspects of the home power system. By those I mean radiation of noise as well as capturing various undesirable signals that are already floating about, like radio signals, wireless signals, TV, and so on. These are real bona fide conditions that can be major PITA problems, but that goes way beyond Mac Mini power supplies.
Think about what happens in your house, after the breaker or fuse box. (Lots of badness takes place outside the house, but let’s skip this one, too.) You have cables of various lengths that often have non-linear loads attached along their way at various points. What’s a non-linear load? Anything that distorts the waveform of the 50/60 Hz voltage waveform. Unfortunately, almost every load in a modern home aside from incandescent lamps and electric heat is non-linear. If DC is used in the load, the AC must be converted to DC. This is usually a non-linear process. More on this in a bit.
Non-linear loads draw current in some way different from a pure sine wave. This causes harmonics of the line voltage to be placed on the line as well as various artifacts that are nominally secondary to the actual power process.
The reason these harmonics and artifacts are important is because audio equipment is imperfect with regard to “ignoring” impure AC supply voltages. The simple harmonics of the line frequency usually are not so much of a problem, since similar harmonics are generated within the audio equipment and are normally considered in the design and execution of the product. The ones that really are a problem are normally between 50 KHz and 5 MHz. Since these are outside of what is normally considered the frequency range of what people can hear and loudspeakers can reproduce, why do we care?
Audio amplifiers and processing equipment, even those “competently designed and manufactured so that they all sound the same,” often respond to higher frequencies. Yup – it’s true. Not only do they respond linearly at these frequencies, they also often respond non-linearly to higher frequencies. Even look at the data sheets for the most popular opamps. As a simple example, notice how even some simple amplifiers can detect and play back radio signals, sometimes even quite loudly. This is one of those situations where you’ll need to do your investigations as to why this may be – it’s a long explanation. For the moment, please just go along and accept that this is true.
The non-linearity of the amplifiers at these frequencies can cause problems in the audio band, even if the amplifier is essentially perfectly linear within the audio band itself. Not that any amplifier really is perfectly linear… For example, imagine that somehow two high frequency signals manage to find their way into your amplifier. Let’s assume that these two signals are at 211 and 212 KHz. Way outside the audio band, right? Well, if applied to an amplifier that isn’t especially linear at ~200 KHz, you’ll get harmonics of the 211 and 212 KHz signals at the output, which you can’t hear. You’ll also get an intermodulation product at the sum of the two (423 KHz) as well as at the difference of the two – 1 KHz. Even I can hear that – you probably can, too. That’s not even thinking about the higher order IMD products that fall into audio range as well as out. Nor is it considering the effect of these signals on the operating conditions of the devices within the audio band. ...
Of course, that was really a highly simplistic example. It’s more likely that the high frequency signals will not be simple sine waves, but rather complex signals that are likely additionally modulated by other complex waveforms and noise. The products of these that fall into the audio band are equally ugly and can sound like modulation of the noise floor or other nasty garbage that your auditory system will have a hard time processing. Simple harmonic structures occur in nature and even in your ears, so harmonics of the music are the least of your worries."
