hospital grade or commercial grade receptacles ?

Irv: For a science guy, you seem to be getting caught in your own lies. A few posts above, you say it can be measured with a $50 multimeter, now you're saying I need some pretty heavy duty gear! You crack me up!

Not being a science guy, I could care less. But I can tell you, BASED ON EXPERIENCE, that the cables and outlets I had cryoed measured quite a bit differently following cryo. It was not my multimeter (who knows, it may not have even been a multimeter), but belonged to the cryo vendor where I have my stuff done. And yes, it appeared to be a very inexpensive device! If you want to really educate yourself (somehow I doubt it), you can do a web search for Bayson Heat Treating and contact Mark there. I'm sure he'd be happy to give you the measurements. As for me, I could care less about the measurements; I'm only interested in the sound.

FWIW, I use a $40 DVD player as my digital front end, DIY power cords that cost me about $100 each and an $80 interconnect. So, I'm coming at it from a slightly different angle than Albert, but ending up with the same conclusion.

Don't belittle something you have absolutely no experience with. It just makes you look foolish.

Tbg, I like your writing style. Your argument is a little screwed up, but great style! :)

Let's see...on one side we have Irvrobinson and Eldartford who make common scientific sense and save significant $$$ on power cords. On the other side, we have Alberporter (among others) who has years of real world experience and arguably a SOTA system, who's argument encourages spending $$$ on power products.

Such a conundrum....

I don't mind those who venture into the forums at Audiogon and say, "I prefer Nordost over Purist and Cardas." Or, "I tried a NBS power cord on my CD player and although it was better, I did not feel it was worth the investment."

Those are honest experiences, regardless if you agree or disagree with their conclusion.

What angers me are the "specification and numbers" types that have nothing better to do than smugly report that the sum of ALL our experience is an aberration because it was not covered in school.

I do not advocate anyone buy expensive cables, that is something each of us must decide for ourselves. THAT decision should be made in the end users system, based on listening.

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 !