Power Cords/ Conditioner/Surge Protectors

@bigtwin, @facten 

+1

It's not the dirty power it's the low voltage and surges that destroy audio equipment.look at furman make sure it has lft and surge protection.our power goes out once a week in the rocky Mountains. The engineered left  furman and went to audioquest making the niagra series.you can watch the interview on  upscale audio that Kevin did. I wish I could plug them into the wall directly but I live on a grid that is dangerous.i don't get what I pay for. I have the furman 20 I and niagra 7000 and shunyata.they are all rated at 20 amps and the furman and niagra have capicitors that give 60 plus amps in reserve for transients.enjoy the search.i would go surge protection first the cabel company let's you try cables out.you would have to call them.good luck 

Nearly all surge suppressors use MOV's.

MOV's fail silently with no warning. They go bad from repeated micro-surges. It is recommended by many that you replace your surge suppressors every year or 2 depending on where you live.

I lost $14,000.00 worth of AVR, BD player, and projector to a failed surge suppressor. The worst part is that I knew that they can fail silently, and did nothing about it.

Retail wise, my amps are $13K, my preamp $18K, my DAC $6K, and my digital front end ~$5K.

Being older and wiser now, I spent the money of ZeroSurge suppressors. I have 3 of them. 1 dedicated to the projector, 1 for the AVR, BD player, and a big one with isolated outlets for the 2 channel system (about $600.00 for this one alone).

I will never trust my expensive stuff to a MOV suppressor again unless I replace it yearly. You can buy yourself an expensive audiophile one that will fail silently just like any random one off Amazon, or you can get one that will never fail.

Do some research on the tech behind any device you are considering. I was one of those people who said "been using MOV's for years, never had a problem" until I did.

Also, the Zerosurge also works as an extremely good filter. Others have reported good luck with them when used as a filter, and I have not hear any reports of them "sucking the life out of the music" like you hear with most filters. My electricity is pretty clean, I heard only a very slight improvement in quality.

-Josh

@singere 

You might not need a power conditioner.  I lived in the big city in a house built in 1955. It had some issues. I bought an Audience AR6 and most of the noise went away.  I moved to a brand new house on what used to be a cow pasture on the edge of a town of less than 20k people.  When I hooked up my system, I couldn’t hear any difference whatsoever with or without the Power Conditioner.  About six years ago I moved back to an area with about 2.5 million people into a house that was built in 1962 and every plug only had two slots.  No ground.  Once again, I needed the power conditioner.  I have since run some new lines to my music room and the noise is less, but not gone, so the AR-6 is back

YRMV

Power cords make no objective difference in sound. A surge protector can help if there are lightning strikes or weird power company things. The ones you can buy at your local big box store will suffice.