Is it all in my head??

 I am retired electrical engineer.   I bye reasonably priced power cables.  I’d buy for geometry and shielding. Pangea  signature series works for me. 

I am not surprised, roberjerman, a well known power cord troll ( he trolls on other things as well ), has shown up. Give this thread some time, and I assure you, others will follow, as he has plenty of company. To not trust your ears, is something I am always amused at. Why are folks in audio land spending money on better amplifiers, better speakers, room acoustics tweaks, etc., and so closed minded to other things audio. Why are so many of these trolls not willing to try some power cords ( they are inexpensive enough ). My guesses are, they know their hearing is bad ( from being in bands, etc. ); do not want to find out, or admit, their hearing is bad; their equipment is old and do not have iec inlets; to hear some of these changes and differences, they have an  " acute " shortage of experience in listening for fine details; the system they have does not have high enough definition or detail. Some of them, as above, have many systems set up throughout their home, and none of them are high definition. Who knows ? Trolling will never stop, because, and this was stated from another power cord thread, " it goes much deeper than the cords themselves ". Keep in mind, I not looking to gain any popularity contests with these trolls. I just call them as I see them. Enjoy ! MrD.

Welcome to audio! Where you generally first have to hear a given difference or effect for yourself...and then struggle to find the evidence or proof of its existence after the fact.

That’s because there is actually a lot about this hobby that technically seems to ’defy’ common sense. There’s at least one old hobby saying that seems to hold up that goes: "never judge an audio book by its cover"...which means just because an amp is ss, doesn’t mean it will always sound bad, or just because a pre-amp is passive, doesn’t mean it will always sound good, and so on.

People I think make the mistake of trying to grasp the hobby as a set of "rules" that must be learned. After a few decades at it, I no longer think that even applies. For most every rule someone comes up with, there may be anywhere from one to a dozen different exceptions to it...IME, they’re there, you may have to look for them a while to find them, but they’re there. I myself happen to think of this hobby as having far more exceptions than rules, no matter what others may say.

The only thing worse than hearing a difference and not being able to explain it is to insist that the difference cannot possibly exist because it just doesn’t make sense, without having heard it.

5@ivan_nosnibor   I have no quantitative reason for what I hear and I only bought this cable because it looks cool and it would have cost me >50% of the price in parts to build it myself and i cant fabricate my own connectors.  Also, I build most of my own cables from the same wire and it seems like the way I twist, braid or wind it impacts the sound (not always for the better, which contradicts my oxidation theory)...