Time of Day for best Sound

I am so glad that I have an engineered foundation/slab and that I live in a isolated area. Horse farms, cattle, coyotes and bobcats, cranes and heron’s in the park. 18 hole GC and only 10,000 pop. Yet I am 30 min drive from Big D or little D. Tons of audio deals within a 40 min drive. 

@tonydennison Yes, the ASR price tag is hard for many folks to justify even if they have the expendable income but believe me when I say that it does not disappoint. A battery powered generator may offer benefits. I’ve never tried one personally but I’ve read previous Audiogon posts on the subject and many have claimed improvements from even more modest priced generators. As far as the original question is concerned, today the neighbors were running the washing machine around noon and it did appear as if there was a slight degradation in sound. I would advise not playing a stereo under those kinds of conditions.

Back in the 1980s, there was much discussion about how music sounded better at night - and why in the pages of Stereophile and TAS. Well, the "why" of it is that fewer people are using their electricity as the evening moves on, so the draw on the power lines is less in the late night/early morning hours when people are turning in for the night. Fewer people using power = cleaner electricity without "sagging." This was one of many articles in the old, journal-sized, TAS (up until around 1997 or so), which had much more in the way of "how to" articles, courtesy of Enid Lumley. They discussed record cleaning, which platforms suppressed vibration the best, how to tell if a component was reproducing music correctly, etc.

There are some power conditioning devices that can make your rig agnostic to 'time of day'.

As my system has become more hi-fi it seems to have mostly overruled vagaries in the electric grid. I used to specify late night listening for maximum music, but now I often find that even high demand periods like dinner time can sound very good everything else be damned.

Still though it is true that the midnight hour and thereabouts has poured out the most memorable musical sessions. There are times though such as Thanksgiving eve when nearly every household is up late preparing THE DINNER for the next day, and that seems to do something to the grid that is semi-tragic for musical reproduction.