Where do cables upgrades have the most impact?

Curious if those saying the power cable had the most impact are plugging into a power conditioner or a wall outlet?

For me personally I do not filter my power. I never heard a serial filter or / power conditioner to my liking but I have not heard them all.  What I have heard sounded to cleaned up for me. Borring is what came to mind.    

I do have a separate HiFi power group. Does this lead to a better experience ? I don't know. Theoretical it could. 

A power strip in a wall-outlet when you have to connect more than one or two devices is a logical option. 

My power section is build around a good 8 piece power strip that goes in the separate group wall outlet.  From there I have plugged in my devices in order Power AMP and the rest. When I use a non seperate wall outlet I think I cannot pick it out in a AB or blind test.   

In a powerstrip digital devices are adviced to be last in line. I am not able to hear differences in other combinations. I just followed this advice because it cost me nothing and the plausible explanation came from an experienced person.    

I have power cables that are 6 feet minumim lenght. Read many sience, theories and opinions about the minimal power cable lenght.  If the theorie and science is wrong than we waist a lot of material. If it is correct then I have the right cable lenght and created piece of mind in this section.  

Still changing the power-cord on an Pre-Amp / AMP or Digital device like a Dac is a good place to start. 

Start with the basics. Dont over do it and go from there.  

Agree with above about speaker cables, different speakers have their own kind of sounds that tend to work better with particular types of cables.  Once you’ve optimised the speaker end of things then you can isolate and play with different parts of the chain.  At the end of the day wrong speaker setup will give you wrong sound.

Info from audio shops indicated order of importance #1 power cord, #2 interconnect followed by speaker cable

My experience is as follows:

1) I/Cs and digital source power cables

2) speaker wires

3) power cables

Mishan 12-3-2018
Using the example of intercon cables (the same manufacturer and the same model), I can say that in most cases a cable 1 or 0.8 meters long sounded better than half a meter long. I suspect that the matter is in some "wave" nuances, but I would be happy to know the expert’s opinion.

I assume you are referring to line-level analog interconnects.

Most cable parameters are directly proportional to length, including resistance, inductance, capacitance, the resistance rise that occurs at high frequencies due to skin effect, the effects of the resistance of the shield or other return conductor on the susceptibility of the connected components to ground loop issues, the effects of dielectric absorption, propagation delay, etc. (In mentioning these parameters, btw, I am putting aside the question of whether or not any of them may be great enough in degree to be audibly significant in a 1 meter analog interconnect).

The only parameters that occur to me that are not directly proportional to length are what is called "characteristic impedance," and susceptibility to RFI (radio frequency interference) at some frequencies. Neither of those seems likely to be relevant to the sonic effects of a 1 meter interconnect conducting analog audio signals, however, assuming the system is not in an environment having unusually high levels of RF.

Therefore it seems to me to be a good bet that your 1 meter interconnect has more effect on the sound than your shorter interconnect, and that increased effect is simply more complementary to the sonics of the rest of your system and/or your subjective preferences.

Putting it all another way, the "shorter is better" philosophy assumes that the goal is for the cable to have as little effect on the sound as possible, at least in the case of a line-level analog interconnect.

It could very well be a different story in the case of a digital interconnect cable, though, as explained in this paper. And perhaps also in the case of a phono cable, depending on the particular cartridge and phono stage, due to a number of effects that can result from the interaction of the capacitance of the cable and the inductance of the cartridge.

Regards,
-- Al