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Power Cable for a Bass Amp Question

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#23
Hey, you know what? Next week, I'm gonna replace all the fuel lines in my car with copper plated gold conduits.....

:rolleyes:

And hey, maybe I could talk my power company into replacing all the power lines from the power station to my house with Tara Labs stuff. Oh, and the transformer stations will have to be replaced with calibrated Toroid Power Converters (TM) and I will have to fit a 40 amp power regulator in my house power strip!
 
#24
Originally posted by soularis
a printer cable is working just fine. man i can't get a normal instrument cable i'm so broke, you guys talking some serious stuff over here with 175$ cables. :D
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If you replace your printer power cable w/ a TaraMitMonster cable (only $400), you will get better printouts.
 
#25
Originally posted by prockenklang
I give up! I will give Long Ly who used to own LA Bass Exchange a call tomorrow and tell him to take a look at this thread,he'll get a good laugh out of it! Some of the guys that he got to believe in this snake oil included a non-engineer bass player by the name of Nathan East!
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Snake oil is snake oil, it doesn't matter who believes it. People buy Scientology....

Tara Labs or any other high end cable manufacturer have yet to offer any scientific explanations for their claims for their AC cables, they just rely on vague hand-waving... Furthermore, when prodded to give an explanation of their claims they tend to get very defensive and resort to calling skeptics philistines with stone ears.

I'm willing to concede that using quality cable components can make a difference, but there's a serious law of diminishing returns involved. No 6 ft AC cable is worth $500.
 
#26
It never ceases to amaze me when people here discount out of hand real-world professional experience because they just "know" it can't be true.

"I've never heard one, but a Lakland can't possibly sound better than my Peavey."

"It can't possibly cost Ken Smith more money to make a fretless bass, even though he himself explains why it does."

"Expensive cables can't possibly sound better than my el cheapo ones, and I don't have to compare them to know that it's true."

:rolleyes:

"Pseudoscience" is making a determination without doing any research. Take prockenklang up on his offer to at least try them out before you come to a "scientific" conclusion.

Is a $175 cable made for the average musician with average ears on an average budget? Heck no. I don't care how rich you are, if you're a true professional you're not going to spend big bucks on any product that does not improve your tone exponentially.

If Nathan East thinks these cables sound better to him than anything else out there, I'm not going to be arrogant enough to discount his opinion. I can guarn-damn-tee you he's got ears that are far superior to mine.

Having said that, am I likely to buy a $175 power cord? No. But I'm not in a position either financially or professionally where it would make sense.

I'm trying to get my butt out to NAMM this January, and prockenklang, if you're going to be there, or your place of bidness is within a reasonable distance, I will certainly take you up on your kind offer to give 'em a "test drive".
 
#28
Originally posted by Craig Garfinkel
It never ceases to amaze me when people here discount out of hand real-world professional experience because they just "know" it can't be true.

"I've never heard one, but a Lakland can't possibly sound better than my Peavey."

"It can't possibly cost Ken Smith more money to make a fretless bass, even though he himself explains why it does."

"Expensive cables can't possibly sound better than my el cheapo ones, and I don't have to compare them to know that it's true."

:rolleyes:

"Pseudoscience" is making a determination without doing any research. Take prockenklang up on his offer to at least try them out before you come to a "scientific" conclusion.

Is a $175 cable made for the average musician with average ears on an average budget? Heck no. I don't care how rich you are, if you're a true professional you're not going to spend big bucks on any product that does not improve your tone exponentially.

If Nathan East thinks these cables sound better to him than anything else out there, I'm not going to be arrogant enough to discount his opinion. I can guarn-damn-tee you he's got ears that are far superior to mine.

Having said that, am I likely to buy a $175 power cord? No. But I'm not in a position either financially or professionally where it would make sense.

I'm trying to get my butt out to NAMM this January, and prockenklang, if you're going to be there, or your place of bidness is within a reasonable distance, I will certainly take you up on your kind offer to give 'em a "test drive".
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I'm basing my dismissal of the high end AC cable thing on two things:

1) Results of double blind AB tests that I was a subject in.
2) The lack of any sound scientific/engineering principles to explain the supposed results.

Audio memory in humans is very short and the power of suggestion is very strong. If you expect to hear a difference, you will. Duble blind tests repeatedly show that there is no substance in the high end AC cable claims. I'm not sure if your post was directed at me, but I can assure you that I'm not guilty of discounting things without a good basis for it.
I'm not sure why you'd make the assumption that Nathan East has better ears than you do, either. That may or may not be the case. Just because someone is a great player with a long resume does not automatically make his ears any better than anyone elses.
 
#31
What I know from actual measurement tests, is that with speaker cable only the diameter/gauge really matters, and any instrument cable with decent cable and plugs behaves very much the same, from a cheap 10 buck cable to a Monster.

The rest is your imagination.
 
#32
Come on Craig...it's not audio cable we're talking about here (where the resistance, capacitance and inductance of the cable can affect tone and transient response).

The power cable simply gets AC line current to the amp's power transformer, if it has a linear power supply (most amps), or rectifier, if it has a switching power supply (like my Peavey and QSC power amps). Once the AC voltage is rectified to DC, the energy is stored in the power supply's bus caps until the output devices need it. Modern power supply inputs have all sorts of noise filters inherent in their design which hangs inductors and capacitors on the line to filter out noise, etc. IIRC, skin effect (current wanting to travel along the outer surface of a conductor) is negligable at 50 and 60 Hz power frequencies anyway so any special insulation, conductor formulation, construction will be of no benefit.

Plus, there are miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers) of ordinary wiring between the power generation point and the wall outlet.
 
#34
Originally posted by Mark Reccord
I'm basing my dismissal of the high end AC cable thing on two things:

1) Results of double blind AB tests that I was a subject in.
2) The lack of any sound scientific/engineering principles to explain the supposed results.

I'm not sure why you'd make the assumption that Nathan East has better ears than you do, either. That may or may not be the case. Just because someone is a great player with a long resume does not automatically make his ears any better than anyone elses.
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And that's exactly what one should do before forming an opinion. I was directing my comments towards those who don't try something before they form an opinion.

I don't doubt for a minute they didn't sound different to you, just like I don't doubt they do sound different to those professionals mentioned here who use them. And i'm not saying you're not a professional...I don't know one way or the other.

BTW, I don't know if they'll sound different to me either. But that's my point. I haven't tried Tara Labs cables, so I'm not going to discount what prockenklang says without doing so.

And I'll stand by my assertion that Nathan East does have better ears than I do. I've been around enough of "the cats" to know they're on a completely different plane than the rest of us. There's no shame in that.
 
#35
Originally posted by DWBass
Tara Labs

I ain't payin' $175 for any sort of cable! This is not a product aimed at the average 'Joe Blow' musician! Not even sure why try and sell this sort of product on this forum! But hey, if you got a business, buy 'em and write it off as a business expense!
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Exactly my point. You won't see Tara Labs stuff for sale at Musicians Friend for that very reason. And I'm not getting the impression that prockenklang is trying to sell them to anyone here. He was just responding to the thread with his opinions on the matter, which seem to me to be based solely on his ears and his experience with some of the top professionals in the business. To me he's just saying "don't discount them if you haven't tried them".
 
#36
Umm.... if you go to the Tara Labs site and look at the technical white papers, there is no data, equations, or graphs. Variables are defined, and there is a lot of talk about university studies and material comparisons, but no numbers. Also, paper 4 is missing. Maybe the site is under construction? I dunno, if you're going to declare yourself "Cable Technology Leader" (tm), you should have some precise measurements that compare your products to the competition to prove that you're the leader.

Invalid Link Removed
 
#38
An amp that can be influenced by something as basic as its power cable would have to be defective or very poorly designed. Perhaps deliberately poorly designed, because it's hard to see how that could be done by accident.

A special power cord will not boost or diminish the performance of an amplifier, as long as it is safely adequate for the current demand.
 
#40
Originally posted by Craig Garfinkel
And that's exactly what one should do before forming an opinion. I was directing my comments towards those who don't try something before they form an opinion.

I don't doubt for a minute they didn't sound different to you, just like I don't doubt they do sound different to those professionals mentioned here who use them. And i'm not saying you're not a professional...I don't know one way or the other.

BTW, I don't know if they'll sound different to me either. But that's my point. I haven't tried Tara Labs cables, so I'm not going to discount what prockenklang says without doing so.

And I'll stand by my assertion that Nathan East does have better ears than I do. I've been around enough of "the cats" to know they're on a completely different plane than the rest of us. There's no shame in that.
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Craig, amplifiers do not care what kind of AC cord feeds their power supply.

The power supply isolates the audio circuitry from the AC line, which replenishes the power supply 50, 60, 100, or 120 times a second. There are no AC maladies that a special power cord can correct, but a power supply should itself be designed to amply cope with at least the most common of them.
 
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