New dedicated line & outlets sound worse, not better- HELP!

Porter Ports are pretty good....I changed mine to Maestro, and found an improvement....but this is never ending.

cousinbillyl has it right on the money.

One of my colleagues in our audio design consortium has a Ph.D in EE. His specialization/day job is designing and implementing VERY high current (gigaWatt) systems built for challenging environments (where among other things) they use that electrical paste to eliminate both environmental moisture-caused and electrolytic corrosion. Tip: He recommends the electrical paste connecting all ends of one's AC system to the outlets. How dry is your basement? Is the moisture that of distilled water or does it have base or acid components? Is the temperature the same from season to season?

Scientific facts: As soon as you get different metals "fused" together and pass a current through them, e.g., a copper power cable and its connection into an outlet of dubious make-up (gold plating over copper) one begins electrolytic corrosion. In fact, when you put different metals together in a harsh environment (say in a car's exhaust system where the hangers are a different metal than the attachment on the pipe - that's why they use "rubber" hangers - which have their own problems!) You get corrosion without an applied current passing through them. Next, the copper, eg, at the panel immediately begins corroding in the atmosphere due to moisture. (That is why you see so many interconnects that have silver coated copper or use silver solder. Silver oxide remains conductive whilst copper oxide becomes a sort of a diode!) One can measure these effects over time or accelerate it in a harsher environment as a critical experiment. So what about the AC connections? How do you ameliorate this problem? EP is a good first start. Hint: one can do better than ROMEX and still stay in code.

EP has other applications in an audio system but that goes beyond the scope of this discussion. But why not try making up some power cables using cousinbillyl's recipe? All of this is fun and you have little to loose except perhaps not acquiring expensive snake oil or going down long, blind roads trying to fix something that can't be.  Another hint: remember Cranoline Sound Restorer from Monster? Do they still make the stuff?

For our group, we'd rather start with scientific facts i.e., necessary but not sufficient conditions, getting things right and then go on to "tweaks." Please don't bring up the Julian Hirsch argument or the old bromide "it measures great but it sounds lousy" as a counterargument.

How do we know it's not our neurons that are burning in and getting used to a new sound?

"Crap is crap no matter how long you listen to it. "

Forget crap! The third time you listen to a good recording you hear more than the first time. After becoming familiar with a piece of music I enjoy it more.