Jez, you started a thread a few days ago, and a fellow fishie got unnecessarily personal and abusive. A couple of us rounded on them, in your defence.
Your remark here is quite funny, and not in the same league as that experience, but it is definitely on the same spectrum as that. Maybe have a care?
Definitely not in the same league Steve no. It's also very pertinent to the discussion as believing mains cables make a difference is quite literally just as crazy as believing the 5G conspiracy. Which as well as getting a dig in was kinda the point of it...
I can kind of see how to those without reasonably advanced knowledge of electronics the thought process could go:
"hi fi is powered by electricity. That electricity enters via a mains cable. Ergo that cable may effect the quality of the electricity and hence the quality of the sound."
It really does not work like this though. When you properly understand how a power supply works it can be seen that the idea of a mains cable having any effect is as "out there" as N Rays or divination by the intestines of a goat. The 5G thing is no more crazy.
At least with speaker cable and interconnects there can be a some effects caused by spectacularly bad choices such as using 10m lengths of thin speaker cable and ending up with 1-2 Ohms of resistance from the cable.... the bell wire effect if you like... There is no such similar issue with mains cables. For them to have an effect is as impossible as time travel and perpetual motion
Certain individuals trolling along just these lines are propagating fake news, possibly shilling for foo companies for all I know, bringing the industry, hobby, engineering and science into disrepute and possibly now and again swaying otherwise sensible people into wasting maybe £500 on a "magic cable"... no doubt cos lockdown under a bridge is no fun...
An anecdote I've told here before is that when I was Chief Engineer with Alchemist Products a few of us (and some old Musical Fidelity colleagues who had dropped in) were having laugh about people paying loads of money for foo speaker cable when Warren, the Financial Director, came and joined in and after a short while went all serious and said "of course if we can get some cable cheap enough with our name on it we will recommend it as being the best cable for our amplifiers... bottom line and all that"... which kinda says it all really...
It strikes me as rather odd that those who keep starting threads about page 1 of the electronics text book, "wire", apart from having failed to understand any of that page, never mention anything from when we get to the meat of the subject on say page 420... or indeed manage to turn over to page 2 for that matter... but I digress...
Now of course to "believers" this is actually akin to a religion and for their own perverse reasons even if we could reanimate Einstein, Newton and Faraday to come along and explain why they are wrong it would make no difference whatsoever. They would be just another three "measurebators" in the eyes of the foo believer.
I have in the past explained the functioning of a typical PSU down to the entire chain from mains plug to pure DC entering the circuitry of the amplifier board itself taking into account each component in a post 3 times the length of this one... Martin Clark made a superb post doing similar when a mains cable post (now deleted) was started by guess who in the DIY area a few weeks back. To me, as an EE, this is akin to finding myself having to explain to otherwise rational people why square wheels are not a good idea, but, unfortunately, to many electricity is anything but intuitive... So here we are...