Electra Glide: Ultra Kahn Power cable - How are AC power cables worth $ 1500. each?

Why is this this fat 2 prong AC power line cable worth $ 1500.

Electra Glide: Ultra Kahn Power cable

$1500? Did you check the original retail cost?

$18K.

Well, this should give Monster Cable™ an inferiority complex.

He’s advertising them for a friend who would spend 18 grand on home audio power cables but doesn’t have a computer. Well, at least he knows his priorities.

And as for myself, $18K worth of audio entertainment equipment of any kind would be wasted on my ears.

I think that was for a set of 4 so the cables would originally have been 18,000/4 = 4,500 each.

Major bargain at that price.

I don’t get it. I thought they might be power cables from some power conditioner to the stereo, but one of the testimonials on the manufacturer’s site indicated that it was to the wall connection. And that makes no sense, because I don’t care if your power cord is polished silver with gold-plated rhodium connectors, the stuff inside the walls is the same Romex that everyone else uses.

The only conclusion I can make is that this is a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. They’re really, really expensive, so therefore they * must * make the music sound better.

(One testimonial said that he could hear the difference two rooms away, which has to be complete B.S. – any difference would be so subtle that you’d need laboratory equipment to measure it, much less being able to hear the difference distorted through walls.)

Ultra Kahn

Ultra Kahn? - I think I just got the pun

The technical word for this is ‘scam’.

Let’s see… You’ve got umpteen miles of power cable going to your home. That terminates into a $5 breaker, and from there goes through however many hundreds of feet of .10c/foot Romex, to a $2 wall plug. But if the last 3 feet of that mess is our special $4500 cables, your stereo will come alive!

Show me a double blind study that can show ANY audible difference between these things and a $2 power cord from Home Depot.

The same goes for exotic speaker cables, zillion dollar optical cables, and half of the ‘audiophile’ industry.

Kaaaaaaaaaaaaahn! Rhymes with con. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ve got several power cords hanging in my garage that I’m willing to let go for the low, low price of $750 each.

Of the all the high-end audio stuff, extra special power cords have always seemed to me to be the most ridiculous. As Sam Stone said, the last 2 or 3 feet of wire after possibly hundreds of miles isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference.

If people running gazillion “big iron” mainframe computers don’t need these cables, I don’t see why such cheapo audio equipment needs them.

Well, the people who would buy this aren’t running equipment that anyone would call cheap.

I would bet that a double-blind test would indeed show no preference. I do have a friend in the audio industry though, who is up for a blind test of identifying audio cables. He swears he can tell the cheap ones that come in the box from the “good” aftermarket ones. He tried to demonstrate this to his acoustics teacher in a class he took, but they “ran out of time.” He felt the teacher didn’t want to be shown up, because he’d said it didn’t matter; you couldn’t tell.

Audiophiles often hear technical terms but do not have the knowledge to understand what these mean.

One of their big big favourites they bang on and on about is cable capacitance.

I’ve no idea how it started, I first read of this ‘problem’ in Audiophile magazines back in the early 1980’s, along with stiff power suplies, oxygen free copper, pure aluminium conductors, speaker mountings that need to be concrete set into your house foundations, and a bunch of other stuff.

Basically what some idiot must have been told is that the higher up in frequency you go, the greater the effect capacitance has on bandwidth, which is true and there is a mathematical formula for this, one that directly relates to bandwidth and reactive components such as capacitance.

This is not a particularly easy formula but what it does is define the bandwidth of a range of signal frequencies as the point at which the signal falls below 3dB from the nominal.

The greater the capacitance, the narrower the bandwith.
The amount of capacitance in a cable is so small that the effect it would have would only be measurable at frequencies millions of Hz away from human hearing, if it were detectable at human hearing you would actually have a pretty effective electronic component.

Another audiophile concern is that if skin effect, what happens here can be caused by high frequency of extremely high currents.
In high frequency, the signal tends to flow more toward the outer edges of a conductor, this effectively reduces the cross sectional area of the conductor(cable) so the resistance of it rises.
This is only a relevant factor in frequencies well into the many Mhz range, and is many millions of herz away from being detectable by humans

In high current, the current density is so great that since like charges repel each other, intense magnetic fields are the key here, this too forces current toward the outer edges of the conductor and so increases the resistance.
The level of current required to do this is very high indeed you would probably only encounter it in industry scale electroplating and anodising, and in some research facilities, you could probably power a reasonable sized town with this amount of current.

Anyway, if I were so concerned about the quality of mains power on my audio system I certainly would not use it, I would rip out all the tranformers, rectifiers and voltage controllers from all my stuff, and instead I would connect up to a bunch of large rechargeable batteries.
Not only would it be a much ‘cleaner’ supply, it would be way cheaper and, given the huge weight, they would make great speaker stands too, thus saving even more money.

Well, umm… that’s an interesting idea casdave. Maybe someday someone will do something with it.
[sub]:dubious: (Hmmm… 12 volt audio! Inverter speaker stands! I’m gonna be rich beyond the dreams of avarice! [/sub]

Market forces; the price will settle at whatever the market will bear; it just happens that in this case, the market is as gullible as a newborn.