The fallacy of ac treatment


I see a lot of threads related to managing and tweaking the ac powerout end of electronic systems. Much has been said about dedicated wiring, termination and even the right kind of extension cords to use. I work for an electric utility; and that's the extent of my credibilty here. The majority of you will no doubt be far more erudite wrt music hardware. Just a thought, though: domestic ac distribution goes thus: power station-step up-city-step down-subdivision-final step down. As far as the utility is concerned, you and all your neigbours are collectively the load for the step down tranformer. Any inductance/capacitance created by your neigbour running motors/tubelights, etc is felt by the lot of you. Additionally, the voltage frequency will almost always move around a tolerance from 50hz as the whole country turns on the air, off the lights - changes all the time as peaker plants ramp up etc. Nothing can change that- the frequency of the grid supplying your city is the frequency in the mains at your house. So what's my point? Well only that how much difference can the last 10 feet of cabling, etc make when the other hundreds of miles are outside of your control? And more importantly, frequency is one of the most imp parameters for measuring electricity quality (your expensive hand-coiled toroids are entirely subject to the f in the primaries) and nothing other than running an f generator can shield you from that. Methinks all the improvements you see from ac cord treatments are pyschosomatic. But that's cool.
snobgoblinf669
It seems like Snobgoblin chickened-out after October sometime. So we've all been talking to ourselves. I guess he was just trolling and not really interested in the music.
Jeffrt: You may be able to locate him on the "All SS Amps Sound Alike" thread at that other site.
What's this about 'chickening out'? Are we jousting? I only let this thread die because a> everyone's point has been made (and taken) and b> I lost interest because it devolved into general dialogues. In any case I guess issues like these are moot as they are experential and objectivity has no place (or serves any purpose other than to make people rant at each other and generally piss everyone off) here. I have no problem with that. I cant hear the difference though. But would love to try one of them PS Audio boxes on my system :-) Raghu