Power conditioner wire gauge? Serious issue

If you think 16awg is small…take a look at the wire inside the fuse that is on the power conditioner…

Look at it a different way, the wire from the pole outside your house going to to your meter most likely is 4 gauge, aluminum wire. It then goes to your panel where it changes to 10 ga. copper (in your situation) to your power conditioner. Are you thinking it should be 4 ga, to the plug in outputs of your power conditioner? Or just 10ga. from the panel to the all the way to the outlets of your power conditioner. Unless you have 4 ga. power cords on each of your components the circle will be broken.

Like I said before, unless you have current draining, high power amps you won't notice any audible difference and there will be no electrical danger.

Why don’t you mention what brand line conditioner you have and. The powercord plugged into it. Forsure get a dedicated line minimum 20 amp awg12

and 4 wire ,with common ground ,and a dedicated isolated ground with separate copper buzz bar ,  and your wall outlets should be very good quality 

$100 Pangea best very heavy duty high purity copper then gold plated  which like mine can clamp down on awg10 wire.

Resistances are additive.  But they don't act like an orifice.  Many people like to think of electricity like water in a pipe and that doesn't always work.  if you have a 14 gauge wire and a 10 gauge wire, theoretically it won't matter which order you put them, the result will be the same.  I haven't tried this for audio. 

A short piece of smaller wire may not be a problem.  That said, it might.  Many power conditioners do more harm than good.  Many a good amp has been sold because the power conditioner or power cord was not supplying it the power it needed to shine.

Jerry

If you like tests, run a listening test…generally the better the power cord for your system the better the results that you can hear. There is likely the same argument about 10/8 ga pc and any internal wiring in electronics. Shorter distances lower current values, different current draw at the circuit level vs the component level.
There must be standard answers as started above to these questions by now.