hospital grade or commercial grade receptacles ?

UHF magazine put it this way : when they put a high-end plug on their electric kettle, the water boiled 20 per cent faster.

High-grade plugs and receptacles improve the power transfer to your equipment. You have to decide whether the gain is worth it to you. I have always been able to hear the difference myself.

Search the archives for posts on power by Lak and Psychicanimal. You'll find ideas that go a good way beyond what you have planned, but if isolation is important to you, you might be happy to know about them.

One key point for me was the return or neutral (white) connection. When the electrician installed my dedicated line, he ran a separate hot wire from the breaker box for it but connected the neutral to a common bus. The isolation was only partial and I had to have it redone.

Hi Saki70, the thing is just to make sure that both hot (black) and neutral (white) sides of your dedicated line are truly independent, all the way from your system outlets back to the circuit breakers at the point where the electrical service enters the house.

My dedicated line was installed at the same time as other parts of the house were rewired. The electrician set up a central bus connection for neutral on the first floor. Nothing odd there, since the breaker box is on the second floor and it made connections easier for him. But the sound system is on the first floor. He ran the sound system's hot wire directly back to the breaker, but he only ran the neutral back to the first floor bus.

The problem then was that the bus connection was shared by all the ground floor circuits, so my system line was no longer entirely independent. Any noise on the neutral wire was shared. It made having a dedicated line sort of pointless.

The electrician had assumed that the reason I wanted a dedicated line was to keep the whole 15 amps of service on that circuit available to the sound system and nothing else. He didn't understand that the most important reason for having the dedicated line was to isolate the system from noise generated by sources in the house like the refrigerator, the computers and the washing machine.

To make the isolation point even more clearly, I'll mention that when I replaced the standard 3-conductor, plastic-insulated 12 gauge wire in the dedicated line with Belden 83802 double-shielded (to cut radio-frequency noise pickup), the background noise level dropped even more. My ears liked that a lot.

I got my Belden wire from the Subaruguru (Ernie Meunier), here at Audiogon.

Don't read this folks, it's a rant.

Audiophilia is prime territory for quacks and snake oil salesmen. We all know it. We can all get taken in. So what?

A lot of us got taken in by the promise of the CD: perfect sound forever, they said. There were lots of reasons why. There was no argument, whether common-sense or scientific, to say why CD sound at the time of its introduction was worse, not better, than high-end analog. So we sold our LP collections for a song. Analog diehards snapped them up, at the price of being called flat-earthers.

But as an audiophile buddy of mine said, who cares? Why should "perfect sound forever" have made any of us sell off our LPs?

There are and have been plenty of other audio manias around. Balanced connections, optical digital, switch mode power supplies. I'm about to test Steve Nugent's contention that a 1.5 meter digital interconnect sounds better than one meter of the same wire. He has a technical explanation but I am going to let my ears make the decision. Hey, why not, if I have the extra cable and the connectors at hand?

I like well-built stuff. I can feel or see the difference in the construction quality of a high-grade plug, and I can hear the difference a good power cord makes. If it makes any difference to anyone, I have compared a standard 3-dollar molded cord, to a Wireworld Stratus homebuilt, to an Ernest Meunier (Subaruguru) PC13 Kit, to an Ensemble Powerflux, all on my Klyne SK-5A preamp, and I chose on the basis of the best sound I could afford.

I could hear the difference when I switched my system's AC wire and I was rather surprised. I was not fooling myself, it was not some itty bitty change. Music was clearer and more detailed, just easier to hear. I guess that some kind of interference had been eliminated, and I presume it was RF because the new cable was designed to deal with RF and I live in a high-RF neighbourhood. But I cannot tell you that I really do know why the darn wire made a difference. It just did. That matters to me, and I am willing to share my very small experience with Saki70. Who cares if there is no measurable difference between the old wire and the new?

I am not going to say I heard a difference with good power receptacles. All I know about them is that I have dollar ones at my cottage and they are a hazard. Plugs fall out of them. The fridge shuts down while I'm away for 2 weeks and I have to clean up the mess when I get back. Wobbly connections mean lights flicker on and off and the stereo spits. I have got to replace all of them. I am mad at the guy who used them.

Just on principle, I use good AC plugs in my sound system. That is common sense. I am taking care of something I value. It doesn't cost a whole lot to do it. I suppose one day I could try a cheap plug, or a different plug, and listen for a different sonic signature, but right now I just don't want to bother.

UHF magazine boils their water faster these days. I don't suppose it's any cheaper--I don't think any unused watts get thrown in the trash--but they get their coffee 20 per cent quicker in the morning. It's worth it to them.

Oh heck , maybe I got the number wrong. Maybe it's only 10 per cent quicker.

But who cares?

Irvrobinson, it's a lot more fun to argue with you than it is with some other visitors. You stand up for yourself fine but you don't seem to take it terribly seriously. And nobody has made any ad hominem attacks. Thanks, everyone, for that.

In fact, although I am embarrassed at taking over Saki70's thread (though not too much to keep me from posting again), may I invite you both to my place next time you are in Montreal. It's a nice town to visit, if you've never been. If you do drop by, I will offer you a beverage and swap power cords on my preamp for you so you can hear the difference, or not. It was certainly an eye-opener for me, and many others have had a similar experience. In fact, as audio demos go, it is generally a real winner, right up there with analog vs digital.

As for the plug test you recommend I do--I must have expressed myself badly if you think I care. The point I wanted to make was that contacts under pressure are more efficient (and safer) than loose ones. I hardly think this can be a contentious opinion. It is a reason to buy quality outlets regardless of what they do to the sound. Only, if you think what they do to the sound may become important to you in future, better buy the ones you want right off. Upgrading outlets is a money pit. You might as well try to sell used toothbrushes.

I can think of one or two reasons why efficient power transfer to audio equipment might affect the sound, but honest, I don't want to bother arguing. Power cords been very very good to me, to coin a phrase. So have a dedicated line, shielded AC wiring, and isolation via a transformer. In the case of some of these items, the difference was both so nice and so cheap compared with a component upgrade that I can't imagine hesitating. But my opinion about it is pragmatic, not scientific.

Your double-blind notion might be fun if I were playing around with my son. He could swap cords, or not, while I was out of the room and I could try and say which was which. The result would be proof for some but not for others, which is why I wouldn't do it unless my son wanted to play. Some say, for example, that short-term swaps ignore the range rule: since a sound system is made for listening over long periods, swift A-B switches are no way to judge components. Particularly if the test subject has to identify the component, which is so far from normal use of a sound system it's not funny.

I am enjoying reading this ( Saki70's !! ) thread. I wonder, though, how long you will be able to hang on to the collective hallucination idea. In the case of my Ensemble power cords, both I and my best audio buddy described the difference they made the same way, in different systems 500 miles apart. Think of IM distortion, or jitter. Before they could be identified and measured, people had to notice differences that measurements couldn't explain. And, before they could be measured, maintain that those differences were there in spite of opposition !

I second Tvad. Quality power cords on amps are low-priority in my experience--that is, if the amp already has something that's not the 18-gauge 3-dollar molded kind. Players, then preamps benefit most, and in that order.

If you have separates, the DAC would usually come before the transport in the lineup. However when I had my old Cambridge Discmagic / Isomagic pair, the transport's cord turned out to make more difference than the DAC's.