Stuck in the middle

As I pointed out in yesterday's post your amplifier sits not at the end of the power cord but in the middle. This confused a number of people and it's easy to see why. Take one look at your equipment. It is clearly tethered to the end of a long cable, but inside there are two that form the loop. Think of the classic circuit of a battery powering a light bulb. Note the switch in this illustration. If the switch is closed, it completes the loop, connecting the + of the battery to its - through the light bulb. Note what you see here is, in fact, a loop. Replace the light bulb with your power amplifier to get a more meaningful picture. You cannot have a single wire in a cable do anything with power. It takes two to tango and that is because the equipment is in the middle, as you see in the light bulb example. Mentally, replace the image of the battery with the two ends of your home's AC wiring. Those ends look like this: We need to loop our light bulb or stereo equipment into the slots of this plug make it work.