Power Cables and Wall Sockets

This comes up a lot, and I wrote about it in two posts:

Does it make any sense to use a small spade or ring terminal crimped to the romex when we install our new audiophile outlets? I can't think of anywhere else we would use a bare wire connection or un-terminated except inside of a piece of gear or a speaker crossover and those are soldered. 

Does it make any sense to use a small spade or ring terminal crimped to the romex when we install our new audiophile outlets?

Absolutely not. You are much more likely to mess that up than you are to use the bare wire as God intended.

I do however feel using the rear entry (not backstabbed) slots with the clamp plates is the most secure method. 

I finally installed a dedicated line to my listening room. I used quality solid core 11ga wire from a new sub-panel to make the main run short as possible, installed a quality outlet and have very good power cord. The change was like a new component and improved everything across the board especially the big class A SS amp I have. Everything took a while to break-in but this was a worthwhile improvement. I only wished I had done it sooner.

Thank you, everyone, for your responses today. It has made me really start digging in to a series of improvements that I think can be done. @erik_squires aka "bare wire as God intended" (love that) Thank you for linking your articles, they were very helpful, especially since I was being led to consider power strips as well.

I haven't really focused at all on the power side of the equation, so I have quite a bit of "low hanging fruit", in other words relatively inexpensive improvements that I can definitely make to gauge the incremental sound improvement.

If the improvement is noticeable, I may not stop...sound familiar? 😎