Are manufacturer AC cables good enough?

Modjeski designed, made, and sold modestly-priced speaker cables (he stopped including a power cord with his amps, saying everyone already has a spare computer cord that would do the job ;-) , and Keith Herron makes interconnects. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess nether are directional. Yet both somehow managed to make superior sounding electronics. Thank God for good ol' blind luck.

@tomic601, maybe on my next trip down to SoCal I'll stop by Vandersteen's place (it's not far off I-5) and give his new stuff a listen. I spent an interesting evening at CES drinking the expensive wine Richard bought for the dinner part (he, Brooks & Sheila Berdan, myself & my woman, another couple), eating Filet Mignon while listening to Richard and Brooks talk shop.

I had been planning to go to Modjeski's new place in Berkeley/Oakland and listen to his direct-drive ESL's (OTL amp driving the stators directly---no step-up transformer), but that's no longer possible. Bummer. 

I guess Nelson's designs sounding great is just the product of blind luck, not knowledge and wisdom (knowing what's important). I'm reminded of the old expression: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

It's a shame so many with superior listening skills don't share that gift with the world by applying it to designing products that would surely sound better than those of the tin-eared engineers who can't hear the sound of a fuse (in "either" direction), or a power cord, or whatever.

Speaking of cords, Roger Sanders in a white paper on his website explains why ESL loudspeakers benefit from a speaker cable designed in accordance with that speaker's electrical characteristics: good old capacitance, resistance, and inductance. Engineering----how boring.

I had a good friend and fellow band member in High School who majored in music when he started college (San Jose State). In his music theory class were a number of the guys we knew in bands around town, some pretty good musicians. They soon learned that being able to play an instrument in NO WAY helped them be able to grasp the intellectual complexities of music theory, much of it mathematical. Kent ended up doing the classwork for a number of them. He himself developed into a fantastic songwriter, but devoted most of the remainder of his life to studying JSB and recording the composer's keyboard works on his (Kent's) German piano.

Are the two above topics related? I think so. Electrical/electronic theory & design and music theory pose difficult intellectual challenges. Both require the ability to comprehend abstract concepts such as advanced mathematics (I was humbled when in my second advanced math class in college I realized I lacked the required intellectual ability). That's why it took the genius of J.S. Bach to compose the works he did, and the talents of Nelson Pass, Ralph Karsten, and Roger Modjeski to design their amplifiers. Oh, if only they had golden ears, they could have designed some REALLY good sounding stuff.