tony sayer wrote:

I've never ever had a problem with dodgy mains and audio equipment
apart from a very many years ago now when early solid state amps were
around and for that matter haven't been able to affect my system at
all with locally generated RF fields, except with the exception of
the QUAD ESL's where you can trigger the protection with an RF
signal.

Nice!

The main reason I was asking... as I said in an earlier post, because I
work from home I've got about a dozen PCs sitting in the next room, on
the same ring main as the hi-fi. Which makes one wonder just how much
crap is getting onto the mains.

I would generally be of the opinion that if you've got a "normal" setup
at home (one PC, turned on when needed) filtering etc probably wouldn't
make a difference. But when you're sat next door to a scaled down
version of Telehouse you probably do want some filtering.

I'm currently using a standard Masterplug 4-way surge strip for obvious
reasons, but you can get an RFI filtered version for about £8 trade.
Which is about 2 quid more than the unfiltered surge protected version,
so as I'm going to need another surge strip shortly, I might well "risk"
a couple of quid. If it doesn't make any difference, it doesn't matter,
it's less than the cost of a pint.

Nope, its just another area where people like Russ A sell all manner
of exotic junk to the feeble minded to con them out of their moolah,
and if he gets away with it, more fool them!.......

This is the problem with places like Russ Andrews. *If* upgrading the
mains cable makes a difference, it'll be the filtered plug that does it.
Which you can buy for a couple of quid, and fit to a standard IEC or
figure 8 cable, or even chop off the moulded plug and fit to the captive
lead on cheaper kit. Although if it's the filtering that makes the
difference, just use one of those Masterplug surge/RFI strips and leave
the moulded plug.

So you can get exactly the same improvement (if there is one - while I'm
convinced on speaker cables and interconnects I'm still a little
sceptical about power cables) with less than a tenner's worth of bits as
you can with a £250 cable, how many bottles of snake oil are Russ
Andrews bundling with that cable?

The biggest problem with the snake oil merchants of course is that it
makes everyone sceptical of what could possibly be a genuine improvement.

--
Glenn Richards Tel: (01453) 845735
Squirrel Solutions http://www.squirrelsolutions.co.uk/

IT consultancy, hardware and software support, broadband installation