ABX testing with AQ Dragon power cords

I would also wager that any guy walking off the street to hear your rig is not some trained listener and golden ear bat...Sounds like poor quality test subjects to me.

@deep_333

For what its worth, this poor quality subject has just acquired a Primaluna evo 400 preamp, and has been waiting for a ’decent’ XLR to plug it between the Weiss DAC and Marchand XM44. I didn’t want to spend too much just yet, so found what I think was the best $300 (Cdn) XLR I could find on Canuck Audio, it has an excellent reputation and retails for $500 US. I don’t want to name it. It showed up yesterday.

All connected, pre is used so well broken in etc, and after a few tracks not happy with the sound- sounds flat and lacks resolution. I expected a little warmth, but this preamp was reviewed to be a pretty good one- very transparent and "non-tube like". Oh well, my first foray into tubes is not a success, first thought is I’ll list it, but let’s just try a cable change: Swapped the $500 XLR with a $950 Acoustic Zen Matrix II, just swapped places between them, as the Matrix II is already in service from the Marchand to the lower channel amplifier. Huge increase in clarity and resolution. Easily a 10 second discernible difference. Dare I say night and day? Would I pass an ABX test? Absolutely. 100%. And this is with $2 a foot speaker cable substituted in on my bass panels as I have sent my Acoustic Zen cables in for re-termination.

Why aren’t other systems as transparent? Not entirely certain.

Quite the wild thread here. Lots of armchair quarterbacks and experts. Telling the OP he can't hear, his system is junk, it's set up improperly, etc. etc. 

Don't get me wrong here: I am definitely not in the "cables make no difference" camp. Quite the contrary. 

But I'm also not in the "you always get what you pay for" camp with cables/wire either. Much of it is prohibitively overpriced and just sounds "different" and not necessarily better. 

Nobody seems to have commented (at least directly) on the cabling the OP is using in his system. For those that are not familiar with Gene at Takefive, he's a pretty knowledgeable guy that sells some pretty good products. Tends to cyrogenically treat everything, also provides optional burn-in (which is a very good idea IMO) at a reasonable price on all his products on an Audiodharma cable cooker. 

So the OP is not exactly connected up with crap. The Mogami 3104, if cryoed and burned in, is a very high quality speaker cable (I can speak from experience, using cryoed & burned in 3103 for a number of years now) that can probably hold its own against some megabuck speaker cables. 

Won't comment on the IC's the OP is using but the power cords are very possibly quite good as well using 10 AWG copper and Furutech connectors modified by Gene. 

So it simply is quite possible that some of these newer cables tried by the OP did not result in much of an improvement in his system. 

I've heard plenty of expensive stuff (cabling) that not only wouldn't be an improvement to me in my system but would be a giant downgrade and a total waste of thousands of dollars. That being said, I did hear one of the Audioquest megabuck power cords in a friends system a few years ago when we were evaluating cords and it was very impressive. But also very expensive at around $3K-$4K Cnd. and simply not worth it to me. I thought it was a great cord in that system. The Nordost Tyr, which we also evaluated at the same time, was awful in that system, and also big bucks, so system synergy and subjective listening preferences are always going to be on the table with cables. 

Carry on......

@hdm  yeah all of my TakeFive stuff was cryogenicallly treated (by default by the vendor) and had the optional burn-in (it was cheap, wth). Funny thing, in this thread the power cables were referred to as "stock cables". Whatever.