Glen, with all due respect, Atma-Sphere's comments aren't really any astounding technical insight. If the OEM ships an inadequate gauge power cord on a huge amp, yeah, you're probably going to get voltage drop that will, or at least can, affect the amp's performance...but so will the 50ft of 14ga or 12ga wire in the wall even more so. FWIW, to create 3V drop in a 14ga, 6ft power cord, on a 120V circuit, you'd have to pull ~80A of current.
As far as the information from Polk Audio, yeah, saw that. That's the work I eluded to in an earlier post. But, really, so what? Has it ever been in dispute that power conditioners can clean up AC? I think not, generally speaking. There seems to be a great effort to prove the effect on what comes out of the power cord or conditioner, but how about a corresponding level of testing to validate correlation to what comes out of the amp's power supply or speaker terminals?
I'm going to re-read it later on and see if some of my memory from the previous reading are as I recall them.
One point I don't know is, was all the testing done with controlled elements, or did the normal fluctuations of voltage and line noise introduce a high degree of variability as seems to be suggested by some of the writer's comments.
My point is not to bash power cords or line conditioning, but let's try to understand if the testing is truly meaningful, not just a good old case of "wow, looks impressive, must be right" type of situation.
