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

@ditusa Hope you never have a fire, because if you do you won't get dime one of insurance. What you've done is a complete violation of the National Electrical Code, and an adjuster will notice it in a heartbeat.

Its honestly a mixed bag
I put an AQ Dragon HC power cable on a gryphon amp and wasnt sure there was a difference. This is a very expensive cable to not hear much over a stock cable

On the flipside

the biggest difference i ever experienced was when i upgraded speaker cables a while back.I went from plain installer grade wire to a used pair of AQ Volcano. 

it was such a massive difference that i reinstalled one speaker with cheap wire and the other with upgraded wire to demonstrate to some cable denier friends

i even made a video about it where i would go back and forth between the two. It was such a huge difference that even playing it back on my cellphone the gap was so large it could have single handily ended the cable debate as anyone not deaf could hear the difference 

now i run stealth audio cloude 99. Once again this is a big difference. They use a helium dielectric and are ridiculously fast and airy silver cables

it affords me the ability go with more “chocolate” upstream 

Going back to original thread, acquired a Shunyata Delta NR plugged into my McIntosh MC275 IV.  I replaced an AQ Thunder.  The Delta NR amazingly opened up the sound stage to a great degree.  The Thunder has more bottom end by the openness is not there compared to the Delta NR.  That said, I just purchased another Delta NR to run to my Furman conditioner.  I have the Shunyata running to my Mcintosh tube pre-amp and looking to update to the Delta line.  Lastly, I have Audioquest running from my Krell solid state for home theater and will replace as well with Shunyata.

Without talking about cables made with unobtainium, where did you start hear a difference.

@curiousjim The first time I heard a power cable make a difference was at CES in 1990. I was visiting George Cardas where he was showing of a set of Magnaplanar MG3s that had a custom wood frame that was built to be both stiffer than the original frames and non-resonant. He took an interest in the amps we were showing and I was interested to see how the speakers worked with our amps, so I brought our MA-1s over after hours. We played the system for a while. It sounded good, better than I remember MG3s ever sounding.

George then suggested we try a set of his power cords on the amps. We did, and immediately the system got better across the board. The bass, which by comparison seemed a bit ponderous, became nimble and fast with better impact. I was not sure that was the difference so I arranged the cables behind the amps so I could switch them in a couple of seconds without having to shut the amps off. The difference was immediately audible in either direction- better with the Cardas cables and worse with the stock cords. I bought them on the spot and still have them.

Years later I sorted out why they worked so well. The MA-1s draw a lot of power and the voltage drop across the stock cord was enough to reduce the filament voltage and B+ at the same time- so the amp made less power. The Cardas cables simply had less voltage drop.

The take away is if you have a lot of current draw you’re more likely to notice a difference with power cords. If the equipment has well regulated power supplies with good headroom you’re less likely to hear a difference. That explains why power cords don’t seem to affect our MP-1 preamp or class D amps all that much, but affect our OTLs quite a lot.

So you might look to see if power draw has anything to do with it in your setup.

To me the biggest difference was when I bought and tried the AQ Dragon source for my ARC Ref 9 CDP. I originally was using the Shunyata Sigma digital PC. It was so great that I will be also buying it for my ARC ref 6SE and sell my Shunyata Sigma HC PC.