Onramp. Ramping up playback performance is audiophilia's cornerstone beneath which, quite often, buries power delivery like a long-forgotten Roman mosaic. Out of sight, out of mind. And why not? The freebie cords our kit came with made sound the moment we hit play. Subject. Sorted. Experience eventually learns otherwise. Furutech's Flow 8.1 NCF teaches that lesson when it replaces our freebie figure-8 cable with at the very least a generic 3-prong cord likely presenting far higher conductor mass. Even if Flow did naught else than pass more current, this has very obvious repercussions particularly on an amplifier. In the overlay at right, contrast the charcoal of Furutech's woven sheath against the slightly darker connector bodies then the black album-art outline. The same journey into blacker blacks accompanies higher current flow in bass mass, weight, impact and pop. Just as the contrast of the frame against the brown/orange colour is greater than that of the lightest cable section, so does the subjective contrast ratio of our sound improve when the black end of the frequency spectrum in the LF—the white end is the treble—gets inkier.
These are basics but no less true for it. Furutech's own metallurgic treatments, build and inline UHF filtration then add benefits above and beyond jacking a more capable mains cord into our figure-8 component. Flow is like an integral two-stage rocket which takes our sound higher. Step one is a better mains cord between it and our wall or power distributor. Step 2 is Flow's own segmental contribution. Obviously steps 1+2 aren't discrete. They're inseparable. To the observant ears they could simply seem like two different layers: very obvious changes in bass power, dynamic reach and substance; and subtler effects typical of noise-attenuating tech of all kinds operating in the realms of ambient detail retrieval and overtone contributions for more tonal sophistication and timbre variety.
The only perception issue Flow carries is apparently disproportionate pricing when much C7-fitted kit occupies the <€500 realm. Spending the same or more on an accessory attached to said component could strike most as unreasonable. It's exactly why Furutech have the Flow-08 version which the UK's FutureShop lists for £175. Issue solved. Today we simply dealt with the hot-rod mega-mod sibling. Either way, both address a problem many listeners don't yet admit to having: sub-par power delivery for their infinity kit. How to organize the slow ascent that is an audiophile's upgrade path—where to start, what to do next, how to weigh adding versus replacing stuff—isn't just a story for another day. It's far too personal to be answered in one-way review fashion. To have any relevance, it must be a proper two-way dialogue cognizant of all hardware involved; plus its owner's wallet, goals and preferences.
As such, no concluding value assessment today. Like resonance control, power delivery in performance hifi remains an unpopular topic. It's not my job to convince anyone to take it more serious. We're all adults here. Waxing and polishing with digital filters, upsamplers and external clocks has its own appeal. Its acolytes simply can't dispute that 'the electrons' doing all the actual work which they call music playback exit from their wall outlet/s via whatever offramp they provide—a 5-lane low-Ω super highway of optimum conductive mass; or a high-Ω squeezed passage. Flash on Chokepoint Charlie. Right before the fall of the wall, an American soldier talks to a Soviet guard. Bemoans the latter, "I guess we failed at achieving true communism." Replies the Yank: "You shoulda known that communism wouldn't work. There were lots of red flags." Once you regard a C7 power inlet and its provided mains cord as a red flag, you now know how to turn it into an onramp for better sound. If like me you then notice not just primary but secondary benefits, it matters naught that we can't assign clear cause/effect ties. Were these gains from a superior mains cable? Were they from filtering out AC noise from a power supply connected to it? Were they from closing the backdoor on component-generated self noise infecting other gear we have plugged into the same mains spur? As long as the sonic wins are repeatable and obvious, I can gleefully live without knowing. Furutech's Flow-8.1 NFC booked exactly such wins. Call me impressed that I got still more from my modest office amps than I knew them capable of. Whilst today's exercise nearly doubled their cost, I'd actually not know which amps to pursue for the combined sticker that would fit my work desk's very limited real estate, sonically suit my 3D-printed Polish monitor speakers and outperform the Flow-enabled B200. So there can also be that reaction even where sticker combos and their percentages seem mismatched. If so, it would credit the "power supply is 80%" line of performance electronics. After all, the cabled connection between them and our wall or distributor socket is part of their power supply…
