Audience, LLC
120 N. Pacific Street #K-9
San Marcos, CA 92069
Tel. 800-565-4390
URL: http://www.audience-av.com
Email: on-line email form
There are some things that just stick in your memory, like the first time someone suggested that I should pay for speaker cables. If you’re like me and you’re over 50, you remember when you purchased your speakers the dealer would ask you how much wire you would need. He would then pull out a big spool of "zip cord", otherwise known as 18-gauge lamp cord, cut two pieces and give it to you for free. It was one day in the early eighties that Mike Shots told me I had to hear what Bob Fulton’s speaker wire would do for the sound of my system. Bob had introduced two cables, "Fulton Brown" and "Fulton Gold", they cost real money and as they say the rest is history.
Well, I have a similar memory about power cords making any difference in the sound of an audio system. My long time audio-bud, Steve Woolsey, called me one day. He was very excited about the difference that replacing his stock power cords with Powersnakes from Shunyata Research had made in his system. I think they were called Black Mambas and cost around $400. What was even more unbelievable was that they made a power cord called the King Cobra that was $1,000. I drove a couple of hours to Steve’s house to hear if they made any difference. I couldn’t believe it, they made a very significant difference, and for the better I might add.
Well, nearly thirty years have passed and people are still making different sounding cables and like everything else, they have gotten a lot more expensive. I’ve spent a lot of time over those thirty years trying different interconnects, speaker cables, and a little later in the game even power cords. Almost all of them sounded considerably better than stock cords, and they all sounded different from each other.
Once I tried out some power cords that were so thick and inflexible that the power cord actually raised my preamp up in the air. Next, the cord came out and the preamp fell back down and the tubes came out and blew the fuse. That was enough for me, I quit trying out power cords. At that time, I have already been using Audience Au24 cables so I called and talked to them about their power cord they called the powerChord. They assured me they weren’t too stiff and they seemed like a bargain, so I purchased them from someone with a thirty-day return policy. I didn’t return them; they seemed to sound as good as anything I had heard and I didn’t even try a different power cord for the next five years. When I switched to the Shindo preamp and Wavac amp they didn’t like three-prong plugs so I switched to their deluxe power cords which were even cheaper, thinner, more flexible, didn’t hum and sounded about the same. So I have been using them for the last three years.
So after reading all of the above, I guess the fact that I seldom review any cables and have never reviewed a power cord shouldn’t come as any surprise. I’ve talked about them in reviews of power conditioners, and even in reviews of other equipment, but I’ve never reviewed just a power cord. I was especially impressed with the power cords form Synergistic Research, but being active and thus requiring all those little power supplies and all those little glowing LEDs was just more stuff than I wanted in my system. I enjoyed them and they were the best I had ever heard, but when the Audience aR6-T came in for review, I had to experiment with the synergy with different cable designs all over again.
Just as I finished the aR6-T review, John from Audience called to tell me they had developed the Au24 powerChord. My first thought was, “well, John, I thought your regular powerChord was world class”, but instead I said, “does it make much difference from the wall to the aR6-T.” Of course he thought it made a significant difference, but he didn’t have enough of the new Au24 powerChords to send me for my whole system, although he said he would send me one just to go from the wall to the aR6-T.
Well, now I have enough of the Au24 powerChords for my whole system. Still when I consider how much I like the regular Audience powerChords, and the fact that Au24 powerChords cost nearly $1,600 more, these new cables have a lot to prove. So let’s get on with the review of these new power cords.
