Power Cords

A big part of the benefit of replacing your stock power cords, aside from the larger gauge that you usually get, is the better shielding. cheap power cords spew out tons of 60 cycle garbage into your other cables. Just buy a cheap power sniffer and you will easily see this. Even nice fat stock power cords sometimes have terrible shielding. Sometimes thinner cables have better.

PS Audio has great shielding in their cables and their attention to the details that matter, connectors..., is obvious. Even the Jewels benefit from these improvements.

Cleaning up my cable routing and getting better (non-leaky_ power cords made a profound improvement in my system's sound.

If you want better shielding just tightly wrap three coatings of teflon tape around the whole power cable you have now!

Teflon for shielding? I guess you could use aluminum foil . . .

Shielding only works if the shield is connected to ground. You need to make sure the power cord is grounded, and then connect the shield at the female IEC end. Or even if the power cord is ungrounded make sure the shield is only connected at IEC end to avoid ground noise being induced into the lines from the wall.

Better option: don't ground your power cables. Build a grounding device and attach a wire from the chassis screws on your gear to a binding post on the grounding device. It would function as a star ground for your whole system and only a single grounding point. No more ground loops either. That's more work obviously. And all power cords should be grounded otherwise.

I've had lots of experience with power cords, and will say they are essential to getting the best sound, but are also a gamble.

Some don't sound much different than stock cords, some sound worse (usually silver), but the right ones will take your components up a notch in quality and be less fatiguing.

Most of the advice on this thread are good, and a few not.

Do not shorten your power cords. That is stupid. You will get less of the power cord's effect, and more of the wall, panel, and service drop.

I would tend to agree that the Alan Maher power center may be better than the Hydra, based on some experience of my own and other threads. But try to get both in house. The upper range of Shunyata PCs are really good, but expensive. Definetely try that from the wall to the Hydra, and you will have it for experimentation on other equipment.

Most of all, if you run into a PC that really make a significant improvement, keep it there. Don't be BSed into selling it before comparisons.

I have a Mojo-Audio power cord on order, and will give some feedback on it soon.

Best of Luck