What was the first power cable that you noticed a difference in the sound?

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.

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 ...

@curiousjim I can think of only 3 possibilities.

1. your amp has a power supply that stores power for dynamics and bass in capacitors, chokes or other passive devices so tthat a large power cord isn’t needed. this is most likely.

@bigtwin Yes, that is my thought. I have a friend who rebuilt his tube amp to sits on top of a bank of capacitors twice the size of the amp. All the power cable has to do is keep the capacitors charged up. this is a very flat power demand. Cable deniers usually base their claims on their superficial understanding of electricity. If you amp’s average wattage is 240 watts, then you only need 2 amps and an 18 gauge cable is plenty big so 16 awg is "oversized". What they miss is the extreme dynamics of the load in an amp where 50 amps might be needed for a picosecond. So if you have power available downstream of the power cable that can respond to these dynamic demands, then the amp will be insensitive to power cables. The cable only has to provide the nameplate wattage of the amp, which is relatively low. OTOH, I have a tiny little tube amp, a Sophia Baby, that weights 13 lbs. I thought surely a 14 awg cable would be plenty for it. after a couple of days of disappointing bass a friend suggested a bigger cable and immediate improvement. In retrospect, it makes sense since this small amp has a minimal power supply. Notice that I have ignored all the magic dust in $4000 cables. All I have addressed is cable size. Jerry

jhnnrrs

No one here wants to listen to basic truths ...

That's a whopper of an ad hominem logical fallacy. It's rather odd that measurementalists that want to be considered as objective so often resort to such lazy attacks.

If you can’t hear the difference on cable?Then stick on what you have.

Objectivist as subjectivist are gear focussed obsessed ... The two groups exhibit fetichism of gear taste or measuring tools...

I trust acousticians.... and my own acoustic experiments 😉

No system, dac-amplifier-speakers, by design alone beat the room/ears-brain /speakers controlled parameters...

I dont understand why many  audiophile conflate acoustics concepts and controls with at best acoustic panels purchase...

I dont understand why many  ignore that in many case : mechanical resonance controls and electrical noise floor controls matter as much as their gear "taste" or specs...

I dont understand ; but i trained and trusted my ears ...They are not golden but they are mine...my room is mine too ...