At one time I was given 3 different Shunyata AC cables to test in my system, from low, middle, high price in their line up. I didn't detect any sonic difference employing the first two, but the highest priced one seemed to change the sound of my system. Puzzled, I had a friend help me blind test it against a stock power cord. Once I didn't know which was being used, I found the sound of the Shunyata cable in the system indistinguishable from the stock power cord. That was a big lesson in the power of sighted bias, and a money saver.
My pal reviews high end audio and often times he has as much as 50 or 60,000 dollars worth of cabling in his system (yeah, you read that right. Like sometimes just a pair of speaker cables or interconnects costing 18,000 dollars!). I use generic belden cable. At one point he bought what had been my pair of main speakers for many years from me. At his house, hooked up to bazzilian-dollar cables, AC cables etc, I didn't detect any sonic epiphanies. Sounded pretty much the same as at my home...in fact...better at my place (my room is even better I think).
Here is the puzzle I often present audiophiles who are so big on the necessity of boutique audio cables in getting great sound:
The vast majority of the music audiophiles listen to, including many of the classic audiophile show off tracks from the 60's onward to most of today's - were recorded using bog-standard cables. Microphone and patch cables that had been dragged around from location to dirty location.
Mixing bays with tons of old cables. It all went through generic cables no cable-loving audiophile would EVER consider using in his system.
That means that in almost all cases where an audiophile is oohing and aahing at the "incredible sonic transparency" of his new audio cables....what he is hearing is the sonic quality captured and transmitted through bog-standard, cheapo cables used for the recording. It is impossible for the new cables to transmit anything that was not already transmitted and captured using non-audiophile cables used for producing that music.
So every "ooh and ah" is also a comment on the audio quality captured/transmitted by plain old non-audiophile cables.
Which shows that such cables are perfectly adequate to transmit the awesome level of fidelity audiophiles hear in their sound systems.
I frankly don't see any way around this basic, logical point. (And haven't seen a cogent response when I bring it up).
(BTW, that leaves open the possibility - if only logical not in practice - that some audiophile speaker, interconnect cables could be made that are "better" somehow than the ones used for the great recordings. But even IF that were the case, the point would remain that however great those cables are, the sonic information is limited to whatever cables were used for the recording and can only reveal how great that sound was. In fact, what the audiophile is hearing is ultimately the VERY WORST cables those music signals passed through via the music-making process - the bottleneck as it were )
I have some audio cables - canare and belden - that were made by the same people who did the cabling for various local mixing studios. Audiophiles scoff, yet they listen to recording in awe, made using the same brand of cabling, or similar).