I have been a stickler about keeping power cables away from signal cables...on equipment ?

"I have actually rewired ( or had rewired by a tech ) a different path separating the power line to the audio line within the chassis, and hearing a cleaner background when listening to music through these products afterwards. "

Two comments:
1. Have you compared identical stock and rewired amps? If not, then you have no firm basis to demonstrate, at least informally, that there has in fact been a difference sonically. This is not so much a challenge to what you discuss in terms of hearing a difference, but an encouragement for you to test your own perceptions. Just as it is shocking to hear that there are no sonic differences between broken in and warmed up gear versus new and stone cold gear, so also you may be shocked to discover far less of a difference than you believe.

2. It sounds like this was not a truly apples to apples comparison, if the tech changed the amp in any physical way in regard to the power path. If there was any change to the power pathways, i.e. added wire, then it would not be demonstration of proximity, but of altering the power pathway. It would be interesting to learn whether the power layout was or was not altered. It depends, I think, on what you mean by "rewired a different path". :)

Finally, this could be a nice enhancement to amps, should it turn out to have efficacy when compared to a stock amp. Yet, the principle still would hold true that any given other amp of any particular design could outperform it. If you compared the rewired amp to, say, 6-10 others and found the rewired one consistently superior in a variety of systems, that would be impressive!  

I'd venture to say that it's all due to design, packaging and costs. Some makes will go so far as to put shielding, covers and walls inside an amp to segregate sections so they pollute each other. 

It's sad to think that someone will go to the trouble of designing something nice and then when they figure out how to package it, they just cram it all in without regard to placement and interaction.

Wasn't it normal for some vintage gear makes to have the inputs on the side of their integrateds and receivers? I wonder what the reasoning was behind that.

All the best,
Nonoise

DS....I hear differences of great magnitude after a substantial warm up of a piece of gear, as well as upgraded fuses. Based on your writings, we are quite different in our opinions. It is ok to challenge me on what I hear or what I think I hear, as I invite any and all comments to this thread. As far as connections on the sides of product, I believed it was for convenience for when they were placed in a cabinet or rack, but it does make sense in what I am talking about. 

All my components have, and as far as I know have had, the power coming in on one side and as far from inputs as possible. Especially critical in sensitive components like phono stages. Now this may well be due to the way all my components are selected on the basis of sound quality performance, and sound quality performance alone. I do not care for specs nor do I decide based on technical stuff like what parts are used or how they are laid out. Because while all these things are important, no one knows enough to know which is most important, or how doing one thing one way matters more than another way.  

All I know for sure is all the best stuff (as arbitrarily decided by me anyway) is built the way you describe. This is also a big factor in why receivers are the crappiest worst sounding components in all of audio- too much stuff crammed too close together. Never a good idea.

My system looks a mess but is laid out with a lot of spacing between cables, including keeping them all up off the floor. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 And yes these details do make a difference you can hear. 

When you have a neutral and live wire running side by side, the electrical fields are opposing and cancel out if the noise is what is called "differential", i.e. what we think of as current powering our equipment. Those fields because the wires are close dissipate really quickly.

There are other currents, common mode, which travel the same direction on both cables. That gets in via ground connections, through RFI etc.  That does not cancel out and can hence create a field that has a impact at larger distances. 


Good equipment will include circuitry to filter out both types of noise. It also depends on the signal levels close by. All digital circuitry will be more immune than line level signal, which will be more immune than a phono input.