To the people opposed to not making measurements:-
You are fooling yourselves if you are thinking that mankind has very understanding of electricity! In fact, we have a very vast understanding of this subject - more than you can imagine. I'm quite sure that you do not have much visibilty to this fact. Some of the best minds of Planet Earth have worked & are working on the subject of electricity & electronics. It's just that these people are not/do not want to be employed in the audio manuf &/or retail business. The manuf., retail & user community is as good as the people that comprise it. We do have a lot of kick-butt people in this field but there seems to be a very large mass of un-educated people. In my experience I have observed that the more educated the person is in this audio hobby/obsession field the simplier their systems are - they spend more money on this things that make a real diff such as dedicated circuits to their setup, clean power supply & even battery supply if possible, their electronics is rarely the highly advertised hi-end brands rather it is some esoteric make where the designer concentrated on making gear dedicated to the accurate repro of sound, their connections between systems are simple using un-hyped interconnects & power cords & I see them talk more about music software, the emotional impact of their repro sound on them.
I'm convinced that this does not come from running from pillar to post trying every power cord under the Sun! I think "Slappy" said it correctly right in the beginning of this thread - you can't crawl thru a 20 or 200 foot tunnel of cr** & then appear in a tuxedo expecting us to believe that you are clean! The final presentation might be appealing, but you are still covered!
Power off the grid to most homes in the USA is seriously flawed in that it bears a lot of noise that would ruin the impact that any hi-end stereo should have on its user. If that user will not fix this problem at the source i.e. fix the power source & will rather fall into the trap of using various hyped power cords as a solution has a SERIOUS issue with problem solving 101! I shudder to think what criteria this person uses to select his/her electronics!!
Some of the people here are convinced of this line of reasoning thru their experience or from logical thinking of problem solving. Others will learn but the hard way by spending their hard earned $ on hype & having their skeptism turn in cynicism & still others will never learn!! As they say, it takes all sorts.....
Do not get me wrong - I'm not against power cords! I'm against power cords that are hyped to us users which have no technical merit of solving the cruddy electricity problem. Any manuf or retailer who suggests buying his/her power cord without ensuring that the user's power supply is clean enough to take advantage of the power cord is leading the user astray. This will lead to more & more cyncism from us users & will kill our hobby gradually.