hospital grade or commercial grade receptacles ?

Eldartford;
What I was refering to, was the use of the insulation on
the third wire as a means of insulating against possible stray interference from outside forces, maybe not totally but of some use as compared to the bare ground. The green tape was to identify it as a ground wire should anyone else
get in there.

Tobias;
Please excuse my ignorance, but what did you have to have redone with the neutral wire ? What was the procedure ?
Is that the same as a seperate ground ? Did it require further equipment ?

Hi Saki70, the thing is just to make sure that both hot (black) and neutral (white) sides of your dedicated line are truly independent, all the way from your system outlets back to the circuit breakers at the point where the electrical service enters the house.

My dedicated line was installed at the same time as other parts of the house were rewired. The electrician set up a central bus connection for neutral on the first floor. Nothing odd there, since the breaker box is on the second floor and it made connections easier for him. But the sound system is on the first floor. He ran the sound system's hot wire directly back to the breaker, but he only ran the neutral back to the first floor bus.

The problem then was that the bus connection was shared by all the ground floor circuits, so my system line was no longer entirely independent. Any noise on the neutral wire was shared. It made having a dedicated line sort of pointless.

The electrician had assumed that the reason I wanted a dedicated line was to keep the whole 15 amps of service on that circuit available to the sound system and nothing else. He didn't understand that the most important reason for having the dedicated line was to isolate the system from noise generated by sources in the house like the refrigerator, the computers and the washing machine.

To make the isolation point even more clearly, I'll mention that when I replaced the standard 3-conductor, plastic-insulated 12 gauge wire in the dedicated line with Belden 83802 double-shielded (to cut radio-frequency noise pickup), the background noise level dropped even more. My ears liked that a lot.

I got my Belden wire from the Subaruguru (Ernie Meunier), here at Audiogon.

Hospital Grade recept's have nylon faceplates for durability. They have increased plug pullout specs per UL standards - they grip like a heart attack.

Spec Grade, Commercial Grade are ad words with no standards to compare them. However, they are *all* much better than the trash "contractor" or "builder", sub $1.00, items sold unboxed at the home center. They have screw connectors instead of the trash stab-in connections. I've replaced all my switches and receptacles w/ Leviton Spec grade (FIM's on the A/V outlets). The remaining 50% of the equation is to torque the connections per mfgr. specification -- NEC and UL required. It's impossible to guess at this. And to clean the receptacle terminals prior, since they're dirty right out of the box.

Boa2 was made the most helpful response to a lot of the sophomoric statements made so far. Irv, scientific theory is proven by expereince, not more theory. Just because you don't know how to measure something doesn't mean it is not true. Electricity is not nearly as simple as might be suggested. I doubt that the last one hundred years taught us everything there is to know of this science.

A scientific proof is one that is observable and repeatable. Which of those has been demonstrated here?

I think you should buy enough Porter Ports to redo your entire house. Albert needs to do some tube rolling in his Aesthetix!

Now look, frankly I wouldn't have wasted my time with this discussion, but telling someone that electrical outlets affect the "sonic signature" of a stereo system is just so much nonsense I couldn't stand it. There is no need to measure the effect of outlets on sound because they can't have the effects being described here. You are assuming that processes you are ignorant of can have effects you wish for. There are many, many things that can effect the sound of an audio system, but different properly functioning electrical outlets are not one of them. I don't think I'm going out on a limb at all by saying there will be no new science in this area. Ever.

And by the way, this discussion was not sophomoric. I asked why anyone thought an outlet could affect the sound of an audio system and I didn't get one response. All of the responses essentially said "it just does". I just hope the original poster has the common sense not to listen to this baloney.