Try this on for size

The best chef in the world would have trouble turning out a great meal with poor ingredients. So it is with amplifiers. The ingredient of an amplifier is power. The chef is the amplification 'valve'. If either the ingredients or the chef are subpar the music suffers. Ever notice what happens when you try and spiff up something that started out poorly? For example, if I have a lousy source like a cheap turntable, the best phono preamplifier I have cannot help it sound as good as if I had started with a better source. And so it is with the dance between power supply and amplifier. Look at the diagram I have included. Note how the power supply feeds the box labeled 'amp valve'. The amp valve is the amplifier circuitry itself. But note something important. The valve (whether solid state or vacuum tube) has no ability to do anything other than act as its name implies: as a valve. It cannot generate anything and it is completely dependent on what the power supply sends its way. This is the essence of what we'll be going over in the next few days. Simple as it may seem, you'd be surprised how many people do not understand the interaction between the source and the modifier. In this case the supply and the valve. It's my goal to help walk us through this very important subject.