Power Cords Snake Oil ??

You mean TOO MUCH Mexican beer!

Right on, Hdm. Nice posts, Zaikes, but remember some Belden, like the 83000 series, is GREAT cable, at industrial prices. That's where the price/performance ratio is greatly in our favor. Antiresonant attributes are where my efforts lie in further improvements in PC design. Yet I continue to see marketing-driven pricing schemes unrelated to real materials and labor cost as a primary hindrance. These are 60Hz AC power cords, period. Even with the 2 1/2 hours labor it takes me to assemble one of my new anti-resonant designs, I can't see why a fair market can't exist for a manufacturer to sell direct under $200-$250....
Corona, you can go on and on about envelope-stretching or stringing dingleberries, but then choosing to name your PCs
semantically linked to a pedophile's 80's rock album's title strikes me not much in consonance with products of next-era R&D. Let's get real here. You want to sell PCs at high prices to the gearheads, naive, and hopeful on A'gon? Fine. Just please try to not splash too much goofy-science in your wake. It just further soils the landscape....
Phew. I didn't intend to jump on anyone when I hit the forums this bright and cold morning, but there it is. Sorry.
Happiest Holidays to all this week.

Interesting to see the 4 day breather we all took. 2003 took some getting over for me, too....
Corona, you even hyperbolized my words back on 12/21 too!
My "statement" Prelude and Fugue PCs take 2+ hrs to build, using all-Teflon insulations and a highly-refined antiresonant, high-density, nonmagnetic, heat-sinking "bath". Blah, blah, blah. Of course the core conductors are "OEM". Do you think ANYBODY making audiophile PCs casts and extrudes their own copper/silver wire? Do you? I use the best materials available; after 2+ hrs assembly (trying to match my Subaru-mechanic nomen's $60/hr labor rate) I've got about a $160-170 CGS ea in these, and will sell direct at $160-185! Delete minor marketing expenses, tools, and especially customer service time consulting/marketing I'm probably making about $10/hr on my $39 and $55 PC Kits, and maybe could make $20-30/hr if I'm lucky on these Prelude & Fugue ones. Helluva great business model, eh? Crump and other folks have suggested that my prices have to be much higher to make a go of it. I know this already; consequently my activity sits at the hobbyist/DIY and myth-busting high-value level. Nevertheless, I contend that there's no earthly reason why high-performance PCs need cost more than $250. We can be sure that if our tiny market was considered attractive there'd be mass-produced ultra-low dielectric-involvement, anti-rez PCs coming out of China for under $100 by now.
Many of us hear differences with varying PCs depending upon specific system criteria, as listed by other posters. Fine.
If this weren't true I wouldn't be involved either, believe me. But I contend that exotically-priced, usually- concommitantly-gushingly-unexplainable performance aspects of individual PCs are accidentally consequent to our roulette of system matching and idiosyncratic placement. And what does "better" mean? Many of my A'gon customers and buddies have resold their expensive PCs after installing mine. Others (fortunately a minority) claim that spending more results in
differences (aka "improvements") they value. So be it. By varying quantity and types of conductors and insulations, geometry and resonant behaviour one can "tune" these snakes.
This is already quite a mature, "old-hat" culture for true
audio-bandwidth cabling for use with mic, interconnect and speaker applications. To claim unexplainably-extraordinary performance for a relatively simpler 60Hz AC application across the board (most or all power supplies) smarts of snake-oil marketing in a quasi-virgin submarket. Many of you have expressed this already, and more cogently than I have....
Being a pianist, and having just set up a decent home-recording adjunct to my beloved Steinway B, I have to admit that subtle microphone placement was FAR more critical to obtaining great recordings than subtle changes in cabling.
The (Michael) Grace Class A mic preamp runs off its own wall-wart, and very inexpensive, yet universally-accepted Canare starquad mic cables link the Earthworks omnis....
Years ago I struggled with speaker-placement and sidewalls-treatment to arrive at proper room "loading".... Both these exercises further confirm to me that acoustic/electric transducer performance is still the overwhelming aspect that "leverages" excellent performance. Yes, I'm astounded by the music-making of my EMC-1, the Aleph P and monos, the SPM transparency and speed, and even the improved coherence and spatial holography provided by my inexpensive PCs, but I try not to get lost in these RELATIVELY minor details....
I've designed a few speaker systems, so understand the basics of passive crossovers, drivers' Thiele-Small, box-loading, radiatiioon patterns, etc. I find it almost preposterous that a single-driver dynamic loudspeaker performs significantly better only with a specific power cord linking its amplifier. I suppose the claim is based upon the purity of a crossoverless (capacitorless) design.
Yet MANY multi-driver loudspeakers use a natural acoustic rolloff of their midrange driver, and some without a high-pass either, thus running "naked" up top as well. The VA Parsifal Encores share this design, with resultant crosses at wide 150/5500Hz points. believe me, they sound extraordinarily good with my Alephs pushing them with nelson Pass' original $8 14AWG PCs, and somewhat better with my PCs. To state that a loudspeaker won't perform to design level without a specific PC is in my mind insulting to all those who've sweated countless hours designing and voicing excellent transducers. In a related vein, would B&K et al specify a SPECIFIC PC to provide phantom power to their $4000 microphones? Methinks not, and I doubt they worry much about performance compromises either. Happy and Healthier New Years to all. Ern

Ok, let's get simple here and assume that resonance control is the next big thing, and that part of it involves the total length (organ pipe) primary resonance. How do you individually tune out this resonance for EACH different length of PC? Are you going to use a different construction according to the length of PC ordered, or vary the thickness/length ratio to arrive at a preferred (set of) null(s)? Just a thought. Maybe with 45 secret ingredients there's a recipe for building each different length of cable? Wow. And is the design goal to completely neutralize PC involvement, mimicking a zero-length PC? If not, then are we to assume that your PC somehow magically IMPROVES upon no PC? How? By "unvibrating" or "counter-vibrating" the universe?...or at least the AC presented at a duplex outlet? Phew. Hope it's not just spectral tilt, lumpiness, top-octave rolling or weird phasiness effects like so many others. Tell us HOW it sounds "different", and more importantly, why that's better, if you could. And please, why it should cost more than $250....
My product-evolution direction has combined an antiresonance construction (certainly rudimentary compared to string theory!) using among previous aspects a huge non-magnetic, compact heat-sinking "bath" that simply reduces the need (perceived or real) for huge conductors, as subtle temperature-rise is believed to be detrimental to audio performance. I posited these anri-rez arguments to a guitar and piezo-pickup manufacturer friend of mine. He laughed, recounting stories about some of the string-makers tricks, including playing with cryo years back (didn't work). I'm going to give him a couple of my PCs to try on his products, knowing full well the corporate heart is behind getting DSPs built into pickups so that a guitar-player can simply push a button and mimic ANY guitar string or manufacturer/model sound at will. We laughed that it could be done for loudspeakers, too. Imagine buying a "universal" speaker that you could punch in spectral and phase info into to choose among a bunch of favorites? Anathema to us 'philes, but believe me that's the direction even in upscale pro-music audio....

"...conflict between the 60Hz and the fundamental mechanical resonance of the conductor."? C'mon....