Harvey Van Sickle wrote:

In system terms, what are the practical advantages to having each
appliance plugged into a separate socket (as opposed to putting, say,
the 4 stereo plugs into a trailing socket)?

None in particular from an electrical point of view (not for low power
devices anyway).

In fact there may be occations with todays highly interconnected AV
setups in living rooms, where commoning a number of devices back to the
same power point can help keep hum under control.

I'm more interested in the safety/functionality trade-off than in
"theoretical flows as measured by an oscilloscope", as cable control
is, I think, a lot easier with 41 than 44.

The advantage of lots of sockets verses "just about enough" is more ease
of cable routing, reducing trip hazards, and having somewhere to plug
the vacuum cleaner in etc.

You can take it to extreams however... a couple of doubles in each
corner does not look the excessive, however enough to satisfy the
socket requirements for a big AV or HiFi setup will start to look silly
because you typically want them all bunched together.

Personally I use multiway sockets fixed to (for example) the HiFi rack
so that only one power lead comes off it even though it uses eight.


--
Cheers,

John.

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