Law of "increasing returns" Oyaide AC outlet/plug


We are all familar with the law of decreasing returns, where twice as much money spent on a system will often not return twice the improvement, etc.

But I believe one of the big benefits of high end audio is the law of increasing returns, where a small improvement can yield big gains.

Tonight I installed the just on the market Oyaide berylium (platinum and palladium too) R-1 AC receptacle and P-004 male plug.

These replaced a standard wall outlet and heavy duty male end on a romex extension cable which feeds my system. I trimmed back the in wall cable to expose fresh cable before connecting it to the receptacle, and painted all solid core cable with Qicksilver extreme silver gold.

I probably would have gotten even more of an improvement had I been able to bypass the AC conectors alltogether- just hardwiring the extension to the existing housewire or better yet a dedicated run from the breakerbox, but being an apartment renter subject to inspections by the landlord, niether was practical, so I improved what I could.

My point is, for around $200 (and could I have hardwired it would have been free) I have gotten a massive upgrade. It sounds like I upgraded a source component, and the plugs haven't even broken in yet.

On a mid-fi system, I doubt one could have heard any improvement, and on a lesser system, maybe a little improvement.

This I believe is the big bargain in high end. Having such a revealing system opens one up to free and relatively (for this hobby) low cost upgrades that really improve fidelity, and I count that as an "increasing return."
emailists
emailists,

I totally agree. I have the mapleshade silclear and at times I am stunned how well it works. I painstakinly for hours took apart my Hydra to treat all the contact points and was stunned how much better it performed. The video on my dvd even improved. I did the same thing on my bpt sig 3.5 before I even installed it the first time knowing it was worth it to what it did to the Hydra. When I sell the hydra, someone will be happy!

What I am more curious about is how does sil clear do compared to your quicksilver gold? Not sure if anyone knows that.
Though I never compared the 2 formulas, I read opinions of the two and picked what I thought would work for me.
Hi there,

I'd like to chime in and add my endorsement to the oyaide products.

First I changed the wall receptacle feeding my cd and preamp to the oyaide SWO-XXX (Gold/Palladium). An immediate improvement was noted in reduction of grain and sibilance.

Impressed by this I later changed the wall plug end of my Cardas golden reference power cord that feeds my cd player from the cheap hubbell to the XXX plug. Wow! Tighter bass, greater transparency, better hf extension, more fleshed out vocals etc. Couple of weeks later changed the IEC plug from the original one, which looked pretty cheap, to the XXX. Further reinforced all the earlier improvements. There appears to be no downside to the changes I've made, unlike many other tweaks. The improvements I've gained are in the league of a major component upgrade. My system has never sounded better. I have no affiliation to oyaide, just a very happy customer. For the outlay, its a no brainer.

Next on my to-do list is to replace both ends of my ESP the Essence pc that I use on my power amp to oyaide, as they are coming out with a 20 amp IEC soon.

I'm using Argento powercord 1 for my cd player. I'm not so keen to change the plugs on this as it looks like they are of high quality.

System:
Krell SACD Standard
Krell KRC-HR pre
Krell FPB300 power
Aerial Acoustics 10T

Cheers
Mick