(Photo courtesy of James Transformer Manufacturing)
"AC power is the raw material for the output of the component. Make beer, wine, scotch or bourbon with bad water and you get a bad product. Make an audio component with a generic off-the-shelf toroidal transformer and you are going to get a generic sounding component. It won’t be terrible, but it will fail to scale the heights of what is possible." (Doug Blackburn of Soundstage)