New power service

@lak I have 6 dedicated  lines into my room. All on 20 amp circuits all on the same leg of the box. All the wires are the same length in the wall to the receptacles.  Mostly furutech  rhodium  top of the line receptacles 55 if I remember  the number correctly  and two with the top of the line gold receptacles. Everything  needs  a week to settle  in but first reaction is a huge change for the  better. Got rid of the aluminum  wire and the new wire is copper. And with the old meterbase that was burnt out of the power delivery a total of a huge difference.  Thinking  that I had most of it right or close to it that the power feed into the house showed how bad it was. Lol I was trying  to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. I was surprised at the betterment I was hoping  that I would not be down grading.  I never would  have had this done but I needed more power for my woodshop. So the woodshop produced its first beautiful  piece of art! 

Regards

The old meter base when they removed the old meter was burnt wondering if there was a short in the meter at some time in the past

Probably more than likely a loose and or corroded connection on one of the live phase conductors. If the connection has degraded enough the load will cause arcing in the bad connection. Arcing creates heat and burning. Enough heat can be generated to cause the insulation covering the conductor to burn at the termination. The arcing can and does cause higher than normal harmonic distortion on the Line.

Is the electrical service fed overhead?

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Aluminum oxidizes and the mechanical connections degrade with time.  They make special grease to isolate it from air and this is generally successful.  It sounds like one of your connections wasn't adequately greased and developed a poor connection that heated up.  Poor connections are like resistors that heat up.  Thermography is done in industrial applications looking for poor connections.  

The good news is that that your issue never burned down your house.  Others haven't always been so lucky.  

Jerry

Did you have a whole house surge protector put in?  You really should.  Protects everything you can't put a high quality strip on, like your GFCI outlets, smart devices, refrigerator, AC, etc.

Also improves performance of high quality strips you use at your PC or stereo. 

Highly recommended.

@jea48 no it is underground  from the back alley. I had the line hydro vaced  so the cuty did not have to splice the line to the new service the line goes into the garage  and main panel there and the house is a sub pannel now instead of the other way around. I didn't  like that idea but from a practical  standpoint  that was the only way. I read one time that dan de agustino paid the utility  company  to change the wire to copper all the way back to the transformer that fed his house. It was a few blocks and cost a small fortune  at the time. He went on to say how much better his  system  was. Lol thirty years later i thought i would make sure i had  copper feeding the house. Lol i dont have that kind of cash to go all the eay to the transformer but copper from the city's  junkson box to the meter and from the meter to my house.