about to jump into the power cord foray

Douglas, I'll try to answer a few of your points. You're obviously a very intelligent man going by your thought out responses, but I have to take up a couple of issues.

1. You ask about my system; well it's what I'd describe as budget - Cambridge cd player, NAD amp, B&W 602 speakers and monster cable - all up less that the $4K you had tied up in unused cables. I hope to keep adding to it, but at the moment it's all I can afford.

2. You made the statement "but personal name calling is not good", yet you keep referring to anyone who wont spend $1000's and hours doing exhaustive tests as 'cheapskates'. I don't know what your income and commitments are, but believe me with a mortgage and two young boys, $3000 is all I can afford on a system right now, so spending big $$$ just to test cables is simply out of the question. It's nothing about being 'tight' or a 'cheapskate'.

3. Those of us who don't have the time and/or cash to do exhaustive tests of cables/components still have the right to make educated comment and opinion on the subject, based on our own experiences, education and of course reading; that's what these forums are for. If I want to buy a new digital camera, I can't go and test every single camera available; that's why we have review magazines and websites.

4. Yes, high prices for any consumer item that claims amazing results make me suspicious. I adhere firmly to the 'law of diminishing returns' on just about everything you can buy these days. If two items claim to do much the same thing (eg good quality IC's), but one costs $100 and one costs $1000, as a consumer I want to know why the latter costs 10x the former; is it really that much better, or is a lot of the price due to low production, expensive but un-necessary exotic materials, or maintaining a company's "status" as high-end? I'd love a real Rolex, but I know it wont keep time better or last longer than my Seiko; I'd be buying because it's a Rolex, not because it's a watch.

In CD playback via an amp, cables and speakers, there has to be a theoretical ceiling where playback exactly matches the original recording. The quality of most well-made consumer hifi these days (eg Cambridge, Naim, Cyrus, Marantz etc) means even midrange systems would be reaching very close to that ceiling, and spending twice as much on cables or components may only achieve another 1 or 2% improvement. That's why people like me and Musicnoise urge caution when A'goner's ask the merits of some of these high-priced IC's and PC's; it can be a LOT of money to spend on an item that may make little or no improvement, and may not be easily returned or resold (certainly the case here in Australia).

5. I simply don't know what you mean by "the sound of an electron". My vague memory of high school physics tells me that an electron is a negatively charged particle that usually exists in an electron 'cloud' around an atom's nucleus. The flow of these electrons from one atom to the next can result in energy release - heat, sound or light, depending on the situation - but does an electron have it's own sound? I don't know, do they have their own color or temperature? I don't know that either, but I'd be asking and trusting a physicist for that, because true scientists use rigorous testing before they state something as fact, something that marketing people don't have to do.

That said, I do love the debates some threads start!

In an attempt to bring a bit of balance...
From a sheer science point of view, Musicnoise is quite right; the science (electronic theory) behind audio electronics is well defined and documented; if it wasn't, no audio gear would work, and designers would have no starting point to improve things.

I do believe good shielded IC's can make a difference over the cheap free cords often packaged with components, but remember they have to deliver a fairly fragile, low level signal, and they are the entire chain from one component to another.
That's not the case with power cords, which simply form a very short extension of your house wiring, carrying high voltage AC, hence a higher level of skepticism from many here.

However, to me the biggest problem is that we often get sucked in to thinking that "expensive" must always be better (not just in audio). It's so easy in a passion like this to get carried away trying to squeeze every last drop out of a system, and plenty of people out there are happy to take advantage of that.
The retail price of any consumer electronics is not based on just quality; it's largely to do with brand-name positioning, status, demand and so on. Any small scale or niche product (eg super-duper Power cords) has to be expensive to keep the maker afloat, given his low sales volume.
So does a $200 PC "sound better" (whatever that means) than a $20 PC? Probably not, but if the buyer thinks they hear a change, then I guess it's their money to spend as they please.

Final thought... my $500 Seiko keeps worse time than my $80 Casio, but it's build quality and finish is much better.

Douglas, my next question to you (and others with highly resolving systems) would be: is all the time and cash worth it, given the questionable quality of many modern CD's?

Even with my basic system, many CD's sound superb. Yet I've found an increasing number of recent CD's that sound aggresively loud and compressed, and I tend to listen to these once or twice and give up.

Does having a much higher level system improve things, or render these poorer masterings even less listenable?

Thanks gents, some very eloquent and thoughtful posts. Perhaps where I sometimes miss the point is by looking at my system as a collection of separate bits linked in a chain, when I need to consider the thing as a whole.

I suppose in some ways changing even a minor component (like an IC) is like transplanting an organ in a human body; it will still work as intended, but may have interesting, perhaps unexpected, effects throughout the entire body. By that I mean that even slight differences between two components become exaggerated once working within the whole system.

I know I will continue to raise a suspicious eyebrow at the extravagant claims and prices of many hifi components for years to come. But if I try to remember that like any 'machine', an audio system's performance has as much to do with the way the components interact with each other, as it does with the specifications of each individual part, my setup might not plateau quite so quickly.

Blindjim, while you make some very good points, I think you and Musicnoise are talking about different things.

You're 100% right when you talk about personal, subjective things like attraction, favorite foods, movies - even your favorite song or musician.

That said, the ability of a piece of AV equipment to work properly is highly dependent on objective electronics. For example, we can't deny that a CD player's ability to accurately retrieve and convert the data on the disc depends on it's specifications.
Whether we "like" the resulting sound of a particular player is a different matter; most of us are aware that the many combinations and arrangements of components in a CD player/amp etc can affect the sound in a way we might like or dislike, but it still has to adhere to basic EE principles or it wont work.

The trouble with PC's for people like Musicnoise and me is that they are not complex electronics; they are just copper wire with a plug on each end, carrying raw mains voltage to your hifi's power supply, and don't carry complex signals like speaker cables and IC's.
To me it's a bit like thinking my car will run better if I use the gold-plated gas bowser hose instead of the rubber one; as long as the fuel gets from one end to another unchanged, then the car will go as intended.

"SKEPTICS HAVE INCREDIBLE FAITH IN THEIR DOUBT".
Actually, skeptics have no use for the word "faith"; true skeptics simply say that they wont blindly believe anything without some type of unbiased and controlled test or demonstration, which doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.
It's also not up to a skeptic to prove someone else's statement or assertion is true/false; that is the responsibility of the person making the claim, and that's where this cable argument often falls down because:

1. Several 'skeptics' (including the infamous James Randi) have for years offered million dollar rewards for any audiophile who can correctly identify different audio cables in a double blind test, yet no-one has even taken up the challenge, let alone got it right, and

2. Many fence-sitters like me simply don't have as much money and spare time as certain people above, who suggest we're 'cheap' for not doing our own tests on multiple PC's and IC's. We shouldn't have to do the tests, the claimants should. Us "cheapskates" must rely on published reviews and tests of hifi gear to point us in the right direction, but when the prices of some of these cables can cost more than many components, I don't think it's unreasonable to want a little more than a string of glowing adjectives, that can't be backed up with any demonstrative data or science.

And by the way, using the "herbs to treat disease" analogy is actually a counter argument; for every witchcraft type remedy that science has proven works, there must be hundreds that were just true hocus pocus (like sacrifices to the gods, crystal healing, pointing the bone etc), my point being that in general life it's often a very low percentage of claims that turn out to be true, especially when there's a sale behind it all.

Just my 2c worth!