My experience supports what Jerry is saying. With some amps I have heard a noticeable difference upgrading the stock cord to an aftermarket model—not a huge difference but one “worth” investing some additional coin. However, an amp with a well designed power supply seems not to care about PCs. For example, I ran 4 different cables on my David Berning designed LTA UL+ amps and heard no difference from the stock cord. FYI power supply design is David’s forte and, when his power supply designs are mated with his ZOTL circuitry you end up with a great amp that doesn’t need an expensive PC.
What was the first power cable that you noticed a difference in the sound?
I have bought six or seven different power cords, none over $500 and have noticed little or no change in the sound of my system. All the cables are 12 gauge or bigger. Without talking about cables made with unobtainium, where did you start hear a difference.
Thanks.
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Carlsbad make sense to me ... I am not an engineer ... But the designers of the Sansui alpha , these japan engineers were maniac audiophiles too as us here ... They created the top of Sansui , the alpha design , with an average power cord... Then i suppose Carlsbad is right because Sansui spared no money to reach the top of S.Q. in the war between audio corporations to be the best sound ever in the decade between 1975 and 1985 i think ( remember the big and always bigger receiver ? ) ...I could not figured out why they were so inventive, innovative and good , that their design shine even today ( i was not able to upgrade it few weeks ago with one of the best tube amp on the market) but they could put an average power cord on their top design ?... Carlsbad give me the only reason i read about which is logical ... Thanks ... By the way the Tube amp i bought waas with his own linear supply and had a lowest noise floor ... But save for that the difference in sound from the headphone out of the Sansui and from this tube acclaimed tube headphone amplifier was staggering ...No holography , no out of the head impression , timbre was too thin , etc It takes me 15 minutes to accept my loss of 300 bucks in returning it the same day ...My headphone it is true is the AKG K340 with 2 cells , electrostatic and dynamic , of 400 ohms each cells , an hybrid then, and with a sensitivity around 86 Db/mw ... It is why i used the headphone out of the big Sansui alpha ...i think that this headphone is harder or at least as hard to drive even than the HE 6 which is 50 ohms and 83,5 Db/mw.. Anyway no headphone amplifier can drive them optimally if the one i bought could not ... There is headphones with what seems to be more "details" , even if i lack no details with the K340 , and i know it because the details with my "upgrade" tube amplifier were an illusion of new details created by a more unbalanced sound impression toward the higher frequencies ...I doubt there is at affordable price anything speaker like in impression , naturalness of timbre , deep bass, and out of the head impression ... Ok i close my rant ... 😁 Power matter...Cleaner power matter but less than synergy between pieces of gear to begin with in some case ... My future solution for a cleaner power : battery and pure sine wave inverter ... I will wait for that till i could do it ... my S. Q. is so good, my headphone is my reference system after i lost my more sophisticated room and bigger speakers ...I will do it next year ...No more amplifier upgrade and money loss .. 😁 Thanks carlsbad ...
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