A not sarcastic question for the power conditioner/upgraded power cord folks

@audphile1 , am I mistaken or did I get the impression from a previous thread that you have mixed and matched power cords before?  Do you see that as problematic?

@ghdprentice , 

 So, if the question is, will putting a lower cost one directly to the conditioner, will it act as a limiter

yes, that was my question!

I like your answer because the older I get the lazier I get and the place where my outlets are and where I would need to move them to is not exactly a piece of cake to work at.

In my limited experience, power cord from the wall to power conditioner is very important.. I use PS Audio regenerator and experimented with a few power cords. Purist Audio Dominus was the best but I needed it for my amp, Purist Aquila was second best, so I left it there. Custom Power Cord Company Top Gun was third but it is great for source components.

Thanks for the input, @inna , I forgaot to add a couple of things:

1) the cord on my conditioner, as nice as it looks, is hardwired into the conditioner

2) and the conditioner itself is nearly 30 years old and is probably what I have heard affectionately referred to as a glorified strip.

I suppose when the smoke clears I’ll move the outlets, but where I will be working is not my favorite, so I am not sure how soon the smoke will clear.

Sorry, @soix , I’ll try to be clearer.

My question is if you have some of upgraded power cords and instead of plugging them into the wall you plug them into a conditioner which plugs into the wall via it’s own power cord, does that then downgrade or even negate the value that your upgraded power cords may have added to your system?

The reason I ask is because I just did some further power cord upgrading and I wanted to go straight into the wall with them (I had a couple of other aftermarket power cords that I had been going into a conditioner with) but I found that I couldn’t reach the wall from my CDP or my pre with only two meters. (My OEM corrs were three meters and they did reach the wall.)

It is not a disaster because the solution is that if I move the dedicated circuit outlets up a foot or maybe a foot and a half I can reach them with everything and I guess I’ll probably do that, but they are not in my favorite place to work I was just curious how the guys (and gals?) who are using pricier cords AND conditioners feel about what the cord from the conditioner may do to the whole effect.

Power cords is always  a fascinating subject, more so than other cables.

@inna , I've found it to be at least an as polarizing issue.  Big surprise, I am sure.

@ghdprentice , are you going straight into the wall with your gear?

@audphile1 , I guess that at this very moment I have it hooked up with pre and CDP to power conditioner, and amp so it will plug straight to the wall.

I get almost daily emails from PCX and ACX and they sent me one with the XLO Ultra Plus marked way way down from list, so I was like, "Why not," and I ordered it. Then a day later I get an email from them advertising the audience forte f3 power chord for BOGO. I remember what you said about that PC, so for half list I order them and now I have upgraded PCs t for my CDP, pre, and my amp.

But, this is where it is problematic for the time being:

with a 2 meter run my amp is all that I can get straight into the wall. So right now, I am forced to use my glorified strip to plug the pre and cdp into. Problem 2 is that I cannot upgrade the pc to the glorified strip, because although it appears to be a very nice braided pc, it is hardwired in.

As for the conditioner/glorified strip: it is a "Promethethian Audio Products Power Flo" that a dealer in Philthadelphia convinced me back in nineteen ninety and something would transform my system. I cannot honestly say I that thought that heard difference one way or the other and over the years I have mostly not used it, and since I was using stock 3m PCs, length was never an issue. Until a couple of years ago--I started following one of those dedicated circuit threads that were thriving back then, and someone had posted that their opinion was ONLY ONE CIRCUIT for every thing. The rationale was something about "ground loops at the panel" with gear hooked up to more than one circuit. Then MillerCarbon made a rare appearance and concurred. So at that point I thought I’d at least try condensing my three dedicated circuits to one.

So I needed the glorified strip to do that with. And at the time I thought I did hear a slight bit of improvement with all 3 pieces of gear on one circuit. But who knows. I will admit that I am probably subject to confirmation bias, and since I am aware of that, and the mind being a funny thing, who really knows.

Okay--so that was all with the stock 3m cords. Then, going back quite a few months, we all got into that discussion about the Preffair PCs from Amazon. The 2m PCs I bought were not an issue because at the time I was still using the glorified conditioner strip. As I was redoing PCs this afternoon, that’s when I discovered the length issue w/ the 2m PCs.

No biggy, I suppose I’ll move the outlets to where I can make all three reach direct, no conditioner aka strip.

Oh, and getting to how I presently hooked them up: I hooked the XLO to the CDP and the two audiences up to the pre and the amp. For now. How does it sound? I do not know as we were having some stuhranggggeee weather here today--small hail followed by thunder. So I have left everything unplugged for the time being.

. . . and speaking of strange, I guess after the thunder we got some freezing rain--I just went to throw a bag of garbage out and stepped onto a skating rink.  We don't really get that all too often here.  

@audphile1 , thanks for the link to the Pangea . . . that would be the quickest easiest. I think in that thread I referred to I asked about if there was such a thing as an "audiophile power strip" out there, and it appears that this one would fill that bill. At the time, it was @millercarbon who suggested I break my "Promethean power Flo" back out and use it for a strip to get everything on one circuit. As far as that little unit, it is built like a brick (that was back when a lot of the stuff was built so you could alternatively use it as a weapon) and they did not make it so access to its guts would be easy. I remember back when my buddy and I both bought one (we were hoping that David Lewis Audio would give us a $ break if we both bought at the same time) they were around $600. Which back in the ’90s seemed like a lot to pay for something to plug something else into, but I was like, "Well, if it will transform my system, it’s only money, and Lord knows I have too much of that . . .".

So anyway, I think that the most logical solution is to move the outlets up about a foot and a half or so, and while I am at it, that will give me a chance to reroute the Romex a bit better where it goes down the wall. That was another reason I thought that  turning the breakers to two of the circuits off and only using one circuit for all components was--I didn’t totally understand the logic behind dedicated circuits at the time and I have the Romex running too close together.

Oh, and as far as the XLO power cord, the mark down on it was incredible, so that’s why I pulled the trigger on that one.

Everything is important!!!  Get the best power cable that you can afford to go from your wall socket to your power conditioner.  Just that simple.

@kennymacc , it would be that simple, except if you read through the thread, the conditioner I am using right now has the power cord hardwired to it.

I wonder if the power cord from the wall to the power conditionner , should be a low  guage  one ?  Such as 8 or 10 ?    According , that there are several gears connected to the power conditionner .

I would think that it should be, @maxwav , and the cord hardwired to my power conditioner looks pretty heavy duty, the three individual wires are braided, but I was also thinking there was more to it than wire gauge.

Actually, @kennymacc , after giving thought to this, what I believe that I will wind up doing is moving my outlets and going directly in to the wall from my gear.

Your opinion is noted.

@mclinnguy

holy crap @chuck that must be one the longest posts I have ever seen- good stuff!

I am not arguing with what’s in that post, but I think it’s a cut and paste from something I remember seeing somewhere else recently. The Absolute Sound, maybe?

And as far as what it says, I won’t argue with anything become I am a pure ignorant novice on this stuff, but I cannot help but feel that a dedicated run of 12-2 (although 10-2 may be better) has got to be superior to running your audio off the same circuit all sorts of other household stuff is on.

In line with this thread though, I am confused why you need 3m power cords though- most people have the components close to the outlet or power conditioner and have longer interconnects to the amps, or longer speaker cables.

@mclinnguy , to answer this I will say that my life is full of compromises.  Up until sometime in late '17 my gear was set up with the stock 3m power cords in my living room, and something occurred that made me feel I would prefer to listen in a basically unused back bedroom.  Therefore I hauled all the gear to that bed room and set it up and then scoped out where I thought I should put outlets to accommodate the stock 3m power cords and then I commenced to install outlets and drop in dedicated circuits to them.

Sometime between then and now there were a plethora of dedicated circuit threads here on A'gon and one of them made me decide to go from using three  dedicated circuits to using one, and that prompted me do once again break out my ancient power conditioner which may be a glorified strip.  Then, last summer, I got interested in upgraded power cords and I started down the road with three very affordable 2m cords which made the reach okay because the amp is positioned where it will reach a pc with a 2m cord and the pre and cdp were already using the glorified strip, so 2m worked okay there (then) also.

Present date:  I bought three new upgraded power cords and wasn't really thinking about possible ramifications of their 2m length.  My intention was to run the pre and amp directly out of the wall on one duplex and run the CDP out of the wall from another duplex and completely go without the power conditioner/glorified strip.  It was at this point that I realized that the location I had put the outlets in when I installed three new circuits worked fine for stock 3m power cords but fell maybe a foot or a bit less short with 2m cords.  Hence, for the time being, I am still using the power conditioner/glorified strip for my pre and CDP and the amp is straight out of the wall, and for the time being I am going to run it out of a separate circuit from the pre and CDP.

That's the short version.  And I type this next in all seriousness:  from reading your posts/questions it does appear that you actually read through the entire back & forth in the thread before you started typing.  

I wouldn’t, but it is your house (I hope?) After re-reading this thread if that is easiest then yes do it. I think alot of us who use power conditioners have it within 1-2m of the components, and then if you need a longer power cord to go from the wall to the conditioner you buy just one longer power cord.

@mclinnguy , house is ours, bought and now paid for. And moving the outlets up about a foot or a foot & 1/2 would allow all of the gear that I am using to go straight into the wall. Not only that, when I do that, I might as well do a better job of routing the three runs of Romex to insure more space between them. Which will put me back up in the attic again, which is my least favorite place in this house, but it’s not like I have a lot else going on in my life.

Sounds like you are fixed into your components needing to be in a rack? A tall one? Do they need to be? I don’t have a rack- I have platforms- so I don’t have that issue.

Well, not really, but that’s another story. The gear is off to the side, not in a rack and not between the speakers.

I hear ya; wear a dust mask.

Ha! It’s interesting that you should mention it, @mclinnguy . When I ran Romex up there for the first set of dedicated circuits back in ’98 or so, I wouldn’t go up there without wearing a respirator. Since then there have been several more circuit/wire expeditions up there, and the last time was two Novembers ago. For that one I was redoing some stuff for the new circuits in my new listening room. "Redoing" is an understatement--"doing over" is more apt, but anyway I was up there day after day after day. I’d wake up, go to MacD’s and get a frappe, and then climb up into the attic and work until my cramps got too bad &/or I could feel my blood sugar getting too low.

Anyway, when I started that last expedition I was wearing a mask, but my glasses were fogging up and it was just a hindrance and I said screw it. Then about a week before Thanksgiving (I had finished my attic work) I had gone to the VA hospital to take a cardiac stress test and this was about the time Covid masking was unofficially starting to relax a bit. I woke up Thanksgiving morning feeling a bit crappy, and by the next day I was sick as a dog, and I stayed sick for better than a week.

I didn’t get tested, but I figured I must have picked up a dose of the Covid at the VA hospital, but I am also wondering if maybe that sickness was the result of all the nasty dust I was inhaling up there.

Anyway, this next expedition will be a lot quicker than the last one. Unless, that is, I decide to swap out the 12-2 for 10-2.

I've often wondered how does one know when to stop with the absorption and diffusion treatments? 

I guess when you run out of money or obtain the Holy Grail--whichever comes first?  

I am not going to put the silver paste on anything on my circuits, but the author writes that:

No need to apply it to the busbar connection especially since these are always electrically live and fatally dangerous!!

?

Is he referring to the neutral/ground bar?

6 gauge or 8-gauge may require a jump down to 10 gauge in a junction box somewhere near the wall outlets for the wire to fit into most wall outlets.

Is this jump down legitimate to do? And if it is, I am not sure where to put the junction box? I guess you would have to cut the dry wall out and mount the box to a stud close to the outlet, kind of like in new construction and then patch some new dry wall in? I guess I might replace the 12-2 I used in one room with 10-2, but even if it is legitimate, I am not going to go any larger than 10 gauge and "jump" it down inside junction boxes.

I am only asking those last two questions because I truly don’t know a lot about this subject. But I guess it doesn’t matter, because as I said, I am not using the silver paste or doing any jumping down regardless of what the answer is.

No need to apply it to the busbar connection especially since these are always electrically live and fatally dangerous!!

All the busbars- neutral, hot and ground. The breakers will snap into the busbar, you want paste between the two, so you just need to paste the breaker contacts.

Okay, I see. I don't know why my mind defaulted to the neutral/ground bar.  But why does the author say not to do it because the bus is hot?  I mean it would be done with the main breaker turned to 'off'' and at least that part of the panel would be cold with the main switch turned to 'off' and didn't the author refer to other connections to paste that are live when the breaker is not tripped?

Finally, the recommendation of multiple earth grounds is not only wrong, it is dangerous and a violation of the NEC. Even slight differences in resistance between different grounds would create a voltage differential, line noise and potentially dangerous ground loops in and around the structure. Just don’t.

I forgot, I was also going to ask about that from The Absolute Sound article.  I was pretty sure I had read on this site tha this is an absolute no-no.  

One note, if you opt for 8 or 6 gauge and are forced to step down in the wall to 10 gauge to connect to your outlet, I believe code will require a junction box.

It does, however it is more practical to terminate the large gauge wire at a small subpanel and run 10awg from there to receptacles.

This was actually addressed in that article; however, in the article it was suggested to put the junction box as close to the outlet as possible.  So what does that mean?  Cut out the drywall so you can attach the work box to s stud next to the outlet you want to put in?

Sounds like you are going in the direction of dedicated circuits, but if you decide power conditioning would be helpful in the future, I recommend you splurge on the quality of the supply cable.

@knownothing , I've had dedicated circuits since nineteen ninety and something, but my question was more related to using a power conditioner with a hard wired power cord and how much that would degrade afer market power cords from gear to that power conditioner.

You should plug directly into the generating plant at your local electric company.

Thank you for a straight forward informative non-sarcastic answer to a non-sarcastic question.  

"Which will put me back up in the attic again, which is my least favorite place in this house..."

It’s full of mannequin heads and creepy dolls, isn’t it...

and let’s not touch that basement door either, the padlock is there for a reason

It’s an unfinished attic with no floor and covered in some kind of insulation that throws up clouds of nasty dust whenever it is disturbed. It is cold in the winter and hot in the summer and in general it is not a comfortable place to work.

It's not about believing. There are those who use objective facts, and those who use subjective opinions supported by any number of biases, realized or not. Those in the latter group fall for snake oil marketing tactics. Those in the former are true audiophiles.

@squared80 , if you don't think that they work because you cannot hear the difference don't waste your time and money by using them; but there's also probably no point in wasting your time on threads related to the subject.

@devinplombier , I just wanted to clarify that what the author was suggesting was beyond cutting out holes for duplexes and fishing romex down through them. I have no intention of "stepping down" 6 or 8 awg to 10.

As it is, every dedicated circuit (six so far) I have installed I did with 12-2. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the internet when I dived into the first project, and during subsequent expeditions I guess I wasn’t convinced that 12-2 wouldn't/couldn’t carry the current satisfactorily and I kind of got the impression from electricians I talked to (not on the internet) that 10 gauge is difficult to work with. I am still not convinced that gear plugged into 10 gauge will sound better, but maybe I am just in denial, and I may go back up in the attic and swap out three of the runs I did with 12 and use 10. Just in case.

For the time being, I guess my first goal is to get my new 2m power cords plugged straight into the wall with nothing in between, and that is relatively simple and wouldn’t even require a trip back up to the attic. Unless I wanted to space those three runs out some more where they go down the wall, and I guess I probably would.

I appreciate the respiratory advice related to working in the attic. I’ve gone from full blown respirators to dust masks to this last expedition--nothing. You probably understand what it’s like to work up there, crouched/kneeling/whatever on a plank that is sitting on a couple of ceiling joists or rafters or whatever one may call them, and all the other discomforts of working in an unfinished attic . . . the older I get the harder it gets and the easier and quicker I start cramping up when contorting my body to work in the places I need to work up there.

. . . since we are already off topic, I'll go on to say that whenever I work underneath one of my vehicles (which I do frequently) I do a real THOROUGH job of supporting it.  Going out that way is also high up on my list of ways not to, although I would prefer it to being buried alive in a box.  Thinking of working for an extended period of time in 18" of crawlspace made me think of that.  The crawlspace, however, would trigger my claustrophobia while being underneath a vehicle doesn't.  

 Sounds like you are leaning towards dedicated circuits.

@.knownothing , if I have been unable to make clear by now that I have dedicated circuits, I don't suppose that anything further I typed on that subject will clarify it.

@immatthewj I totally empathize. If it can make you feel any better, mine will entail spending a day in a spider-infested crawlspace with 18" clearance under the beams.

Yuk!  @devinplombier , my claustrophobia is kicking in just thinking about that.  Being buried alive is way up high on my list of ways that I do not want to die.  And just reading the word "crawlspace" makes me of John Gacy.

Honestly, before you go to too much trouble you might want to assess the worst load you’re ever likely to plug into your existing 12awg circuits, before you declare them inadequate. In my most humble opinion, unless you’re planning to biamp Apogee Scintillas with a quatuor of Krell KMA-800s you’re probably fine 

I am kind of leaning that way.  With the three circuits that I have there's a few ways to do it, which include having my amp all by itself.  It is a small room, and it is not like I am listening at earth moving dB levels.

Doesn’t this fall under the weakest link category?

@curiousjim , I am inclined to think that it might, but I am not positive about anything anymore.

Have you watched The Vanishing? The original Dutch version

Sorry for the off topic everyone 🙂

No problems on the off topic, @devinplombier ; anyway I had to google to make sure I was thinking about the same movie, and the one I saw had Kiefer and Jeff Bridges (and since I wasn't as tuned to actors and actresses back then as I am now, I just realized Sandra Bullock, who I usually enjoy a lot).  So I am thinking that this is not the original Dutch version.  Anyway, I think I've only watched that movie once, but I do remember that it bothered me ('bothered me' is the best I can do at the moment) considering the notion of someone being put in a box and buried alive.   Man, that would be terrible.  I can only imagine the insanity that would precede death by hypoxia.  But I do not like to imagine it.  I typed that it was way up high on my list of ways I don't want to die, but thinking about it, it may be at the very top of that list.

I've seen a couple or so movies since that involve someone being buried alive in a box, and it never fails to get to me.  I almost cannot watch it.  

. . . staying off topic, @devinplombier , this all made me think of another movie I saw a while back ago, and I had to do a google because I forgot the name of it, but it was The Last Descent.  Anyway, it was apparently based on factual events that occurred in 2009 in a cave in Utah when two brothers were out spelunking together and one of them decided to go down a tunnel that led just about straight down (as in inverted) where he got stuck and (after doing another google) spent 27 hours before expiring. And as I remember from the movie, he was so stuck that they never did recover his body as the risk of collapse of the cave would have been too great.

I remember watching that and being overcome by my own claustrophobia.  

@knownothing , thanks for clarifying. And I didn't take anything negative from the 12/10 river of denial comment.   And now that I see what you are getting at, yes, what I think I am going achieve  first is running my gear straight to the wall with nothing in between. And sorry if I may have came off as sounding terse about it.  And whether or not I will swap out those runs of 12-2 that I put in for 10 is up in the air.  

Ha ha!  Well, @grislybutter , I guess do what you gotta do.

@chrisoshea , how helpful that was. You may have some reading comprehension challenges. And where did you learn to end a sentence with an improperly spaced three dot ellipsis?

@audphile1

I counted four dots @immatthewj

just sayin’…

hey so what did you end up doing?

my eyesight is getting pretty bad, but for this sentence:

OP

has some communication challenges…

I can only count three no matter how close I get my face to my screen. Meaning that the period at the end of the sentence (the second sentence which also utilized an ellipsis) was omitted. Which doesn’t matter to me, but considering that it was a critique of my ability to communicate, I just thought that I would bring it to the attention of " @chrisoshea ." The same "chrisoshea" who I am now pretty sure is someone else’s sock puppet.

Regardless of any of that: my system is down for maintenance. I am going to run my 2 m power cords directly into the wall from the gear.

@audphile1 , at the risk of being trolled by the Shea "brothers" (Chriso and Tim), I'll give you a quick update of sorts.

The maintenance I was going to do never got past the staging process.  In other words I had everything unplugged and moved out of the way and had my drywall tools and etc on site and ready to go, but I just couldn't get myself to start the project.  I do plan on moving those outlets, but for the time being I set everything back up with the "glorified strip" and I have been listening for maybe a week.  I have not A/Bed those new cords (yet) but I must say I am liking the way everything sounds right now.  And I was not feeling that positive about it when I shut it down for the maintenance that did not happen.

With that typed, I am not saying for positive that it was the new cords I put into my system.  I am a moody person and the ears are connected to the mind and the mind (at least my mind) is a complicated entity and it does funny things to me.  Not funny as in ha ha, but funny as in I don't understand it. 

@mclinnguy , yes, you were/are right, and I took your advice.