This is THE powercord I want :

Personally I doubt that conductivity is what a great PC is about. Otherwise using the same stuff as you have in the wall as a PC would sound as good as or better than anything else (since 5 feet cannot be significant in the many metres overall). Nevertheless, a very interesting read.

Come out, come out, you lurking voter that disliked my post. Let me know what you disapproved of.

I do not find anything inconsistent between your view and mine Frank. And I know a good power cable occupying the last 5 feet makes a difference. But having played with making perhaps 20 different designs of PC as well as buying exotic PCs from the US and having to terminate them into local plugs (different from the US ones), I do not see a strong correlation between a good PC and very low resistance. Yes you need a certain guage of cable, but diminishing returns set in. Purity of the copper is good, geometry is very influential on the sound, as is shielding, as is dialectric. But nothing in my sessions designing, building or having power cables built led me to believe that super-low resistance was all that was required.

Frank, I am not so sure. Certainly the recycled copper in the Taiwanese stuff you get at the cheap joints (here it would be Dick Smith Electronics, but there it is possibly Radio Shack?) does sound dirty. And I reckon the Harmonic Technology cables do benefit from the quality of conductor used. But geometry and dialectric are hugely important. Possibly even more so in PCs than in signal carrying wires. And I suspect geometry is the most important element in PCs, and dialectric the most important in interconnects and speaker cables. But this is just speculation from experimentation.

Liguy, you are probably right and it is a good point about a switching power supply, but as you described the situation it occurred to me to add that the differences in PCs may not be so readily discernible in an unfamiliar system. I think good PCs reduce noise and that this difference is not eliminated by most (perhaps all) power supplies. When you have these noise products constantly in your system and then they are reduced by a better PC, you recognise it as a "night and day" difference. I have found when helping people with their systems that I have been disappointed with the impact upgrading the PC appeared to me to have (compared with the impact in my system). But my alternative theory for this is that the impact of better PCs is much more obvious in a system where you have very good dedicated power feeds.