Which power cord more important?

Think the conventional wisdom is that the more refined power -- such as you might hope to find with more expensive wires (ah, were it only so simple) -- is commonly better applied towards the beginning of your chain on lower-power items. In case that made no sense, a CD player is an awfully delicate item that deals with rather small power consumption and some real complicated tasks (reading bits off of a spinning disc with a laser, converting it from a digital to an analog signal, amplifying it a tad to output volume, etc). By comparison, an amp is a brute force item, it takes whatever signal is fed to it, sucks a bunch of power, and amplifies it (or more often attenuates it, but that's another story). The theory goes, better power delivery thus makes a bigger difference on a CD player than an amp, because the little differences are much more important at that stage and for the task at hand (and hash in up the chain only then gets amplified at the amp and made worse). Now, with an itegrated, you're complicating things a bit because the pre-amp section on the integrated has got some relatively complicated (by comparison to the amp) stuff to do itself (the volume pot in particular).

In reality, however, I suspect that the "rule&" doesn't count for squat. If you go with one, try it on both and see what you think. And if it helps on one and not the other, you've just saved yourself the price of a second....

Think the conventional wisdom is that the more refined power -- such as you might hope to find with more expensive wires (ah, were it only so simple) -- is commonly better applied towards the beginning of your chain on lower-power items.

Although there are lots of technical arguments that can be made in favor of the opposite conclusion, including the facts that low resistance in the power cord and its connections is much more important when the current involved is high and is fluctuating (as in a power amp or integrated amp), and the need for shielding to keep high frequency noise generated by the amp (due to inductive kickback from its power transformer) from contaminating other parts of the system.

See Atmasphere's posts in this thread:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?aamps&1249822202

Regards,
-- Al

Paul McGowan from PS Audio advises to use the best power cord closest to the source of your AC. So if you are using a power conditioner, the "best" power cord should go from the wall outlet into the conditioner. That allows the most efficient power delivery into the conditioner that feeds the rest of your system.

Considering what to do with a CD Player and Int. Amp., use good quality cords on both. Use the cable with the largest gauge conductors for the amp and smaller gauge conductors for the CD Player as it demands much less current to operate optimumly IMHO.

Sidssp,the pc's on my amp and cdp were getting loose on the iec end so I tried the PS Audio's.I like them for the reasons stated in my first post.

All of the above advice, I think, is valid. The only thing I would ad is that power cords do not always make a better difference; a lot of times they do more harm than good. Also, when picking between one of your two components to do the cable upgrade, I would go with what ever component is weakest from a design standpoint. For example, if you have mass market sony or denon universal player and a roland or ayre int amp, the source would be the weaker component by design and would get the cable. The amp in this case would already have some power conditioning built into the product so the need would be not as great. It is a vague example based on the variety of the components out there but I think you can get the basic idea what I mean