Review YETI Reference power cable

Intro

Power cables are always a topic of discussion. Power is power… 230 volts is 230 volts and 50 Hz is 50 Hz…. Yes. That’s right. And yet we hear differences. Why is that? We are going to find out one day. Until then you have to make do with our measurements, samples and our blue eyes. We are going to take a good look at the new Yeti Reference power cable. A wonderfully flexible power cable.

Yeti power cables have been used in our reference system for some time now. The reason is simple: they are well priced and just sound good. Really a decent, no-nonsense cable. Solid core copper (yes, it’s not allowed, but it does sound good :-)) with a decent plug.

Can it get any better? Sure it can! That’s what we hear during this review. But hey: that price / quality… we are also sensitive to that.

The Reference is something else: 1099 per meter. And 400 Euro extra per half meter. Different price range… but: is it worth the difference? More on that later.

Flexible

What is really a relief about the Reference is that it is flexible. The regular solid core cables are incredibly stiff. We can bend them, but it’s not easy and it will break at some point, especially with us, because we change them from time to time.

The Reference is a twisted pair cable with very thick – stranded – cores (3 x 6mm2/ 9 AWG!), nice plugs with pure copper connectors. Internally the cable is made of silver plated copper, which can also be seen in the measurements: the conductivity is high, the resistance is very low. And that is nice for the connected equipment of course.

The Reference has no shielding. Normally we are really in favor of shielding but we also know that it has advantages and disadvantages. This was evident from the speaker cable test where the Shunyata scored very well and has no shielding. Driade doesn’t either. In short: it is not sacred. Whether this also applies to power-cables, we will find out soon enough.