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Does a power conditioner do anything for audio quality?

I have a big isolation transformer that sits between the wall and my stuff. Not the faintest clue if it actually does anything audibly, but it serves as both a power strip and an extension cord. I do notice the power transformers on the tube amps hum slightly less with that in place, so maybe its removing a bit of residual DC on the line.
 
gadget73 said:
I have a big isolation transformer that sits between the wall and my stuff. Not the faintest clue if it actually does anything audibly, but it serves as both a power strip and an extension cord. I do notice the power transformers on the tube amps hum slightly less with that in place, so maybe its removing a bit of residual DC on the line.
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Thanks for getting us back on track
 
I’d give anything for a mod to lock this

Summary
Most people think they might work but no one really knows. Lots of anecdotal experiences. Interesting read actually bc I learned about a few new products I was unfamiliar with.

a couple people w egos are pedants and sucking the life out of the thread

perfect. Good talk
 
Another update: Since my post #86 on page 5, I was hearing more and more noise from the shop system, and found the source to be the four-outlet Powervar. I pulled it out and...silence. It's going to be more work to fix than the other one - it's probably the thermistor again, but more difficult to get to and soldered this time. The solder joints are really stout in that unit, beautiful really.
 
@stoutblock, point taken about the Hirsch comment. I still can’t believe that anyone today finds THD to be a valuable metric.

You and Amir are welcome to believe whatever you will. My experience and that of more than one audio reviewer friend is they can make subtle improvements in audible sound quality.

FWIW, I also have dedicated 20A lines going to my listening room. Only sources are used with the conditioner.
 
E-Stat said:
@stoutblock, point taken about the Hirsch comment. I still can’t believe that anyone today finds THD to be a valuable metric.

You and Amir are welcome to believe whatever you will. My experience and that of more than one audio reviewer friend is they can make subtle improvements in audible sound quality.

FWIW, I also have dedicated 20A lines going to my listening room. Only sources are used with the conditioner.
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Despite my general distaste for your contributions to this thread (and those that are combative on the opposing side) because you all but seem to be calling the other side ‘idiots’, I completely agree w this statement. THD is kind of a joke. The best sounding gear I’ve heard had some of the worst numbers. Could just be my bad ears or it could be that the numbers are always so small that matters little, or that distortion we readily hear is at a frequency extremes right before clipping and that’s not really reflected in the THD number
 
liteagilis said:
THD is kind of a joke. The best sounding gear I’ve heard had some of the worst numbers. Could just be my bad ears or it could be that the numbers are always so small that matters little, or that distortion we readily hear is at a frequency extremes right before clipping and that’s not really reflected in the THD number
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I suspect that THD is often measured with signals that are too high, where noise and other low-level nasties are masked. More testing at small (and very small) signal levels might be more revealing, especially in power amps. I think Nelson Pass said something to the effect of "if the first watt is rubbish, what's the point of another 99 of 'em?" Yet the lab guys seem to love measuring everything at full output.
 
stoutblock said:
I had a weird and random noise problem with my system for many years that was very difficult to chase down. I was able to do things that made it better but never eliminated it. I routed interconnects, speaker cables and power cables carefully. I raised cables off the carpet. I managed the grounding between the components. All of this actually helped a lot but random problems still raised their ugly head. My listening room had carpet and I noticed the problems tend to be worse when static electricity was high in the room. In fact, static electricity tended to be high throughout my home at times. The water coming out of one upstairs faucet would give you a little zap when you would first wash your hands.

Then one day I was doing some gardening and mistakenly bumped my grounding rod below the main panel and noticed the clamp was loose. It always looked fine but I did not realize it was loose until now. I spent some time and cleaned it up along with the rod and made sure it was well secured. I also installed a better clamp on the grounding wire coming out of the panels as I noticed it had some low current resistance. I had everything working very well to ground even with low current. I really had no expectations this would help with my audio noise problems but just wanted to make sure it was doing its job for safety reasons.

The amazing thing is after this panel ground repair the static electricity problems have totally disappeared in my home along with the weird random noise I would get in my system. So much so that I am less concerned about the system cabling and I’ve removed the temporary spacers I was using to get the cables off the carpet. I have had no problems with noise in the system since the ground rod repair. I don’t think the root cause of the noise was electrical grounding but was static electricity.
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it sounds like you had some current flow on the ground system and a poor ground. This may explain why one faucet had “ static”. You may have had something coupling this leakage current to your water pipes ( possible path to earth ground). Chances are, you may still have a fault somewhere that is bleeding some voltage to the ground.
 
It appears Amir's tests, despite showing big changes in SINAD of the AC side, showed no changes in SINAD of the actual audio output.

To get a "blacker background", facilitating more of the music to come through as some using power conditioner have reported, wouldn't the SINAD of the audio output necessarily have to improve?
 
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whoaru99 said:
It appears Amir's tests, despite showing big changes in SINAD of the AC side, showed no changes in SINAD of the actual audio output.

To get a "blacker background", facilitating more of the music to come through as some using power conditioner have reported, wouldn't the SINAD of the audio output necessarily have to improve?
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Yes, that would seem logical, but I'm not sure how much Amir really wanted to find any difference. Was there any RF on the distorted mains sinewave? Were any checks made to test the possibility of RF at the power input polluting the audio circuit? Of course it's no surprise to find that a mains waveform that isn't perfectly sinusoidal is still capable of producing the correct DC voltage at the output of a power supply. It would be a staggering revelation to discover that it did make a difference. But so what? :dunno: I think a bit more effort to look for more subtle artefacts was required.
And of course, some equipment is likely to be more sensitive to mains noise than others. An experiment to "prove" that one piece of audio equipment is insensitive to mains noise doesn't prove that all audio equipment is insensitive to mains noise.
 
Indeed, and in the same vein, simply because not every piece of gear can be tested in every scenario, we don't throw out the baby with the bath water.

What I think it should "prove" is just because you can clean up the AC mains, shouldn't be construed to necessarily translate into improved audio. From what I often read in threads about power conditioners, the comments seem to me those are usually inferred, if not stated, to be a synonymous relationship.
 
liteagilis said:
Most people think they might work but no one really knows.
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A simple furman pl-plus eliminated the audible pop that occurred when the swamp cooler kicked on.
That part of conditioning does work on my stuff.

After going with a dedicated lines, the AC regulation of my other furmans help keep tube bias at perfect levels.

I don't have the ears to notice if there are other subtle effects the conditioners may have. :)
 
Power line AC, if clean, is a sine wave. If that is severely distorted out of shape or if there is spikey garbage riding on it, then it could be rightfully called "dirty AC". Dirty may be okay for a martini, but not for power intended for hi-fi use. A sine wave that is flattened on the peaks, if severe enough, can cause 60Hz power transformer buzzing & overheating. For a switchmode supply, that's no problem. Spikey or RF garbage can get through the transformer either through capacitive coupling or maybe radiated RF just riding slipshod right over everything. That type of noise will not get through via 60Hz transformer action because the bandwidth of the device is too small for that.
 
Twenty plus years ago when I first started working part time for the high end audio dealer I still work for I tried an experiment to see just how much power conditioning and power cables could affect the power supplied to a device and what it would do for the performance.

The dealer's house is built of stucco, basically a Faraday cage of concrete on wire mesh, so noise either stays in or keeps out.

I took an Icom R-71A (a very highly regarded shortwave radio, one of the best that have been made for consumer/Ham use from one of the higher quality Japanese communications manufacturers) to his house and experimented with just a short whip connected to the SO-239 antenna connector with a matching right hand elbow joint PL-259 plug.

The power supply is built into this radio for use from below the broadcast band to 30mHz, and meant to be used where transmitters may be present.

The Icom has an IEC power connector for the AC line making it possible to evaluate power cable effects on this radio.

I used WWV from Ft. Collins, Colo. as my signal source at 15.000mHz.

I won't go through all the minutiae but as I experimented with power cables and conditioners I found combinations that took the received noise level down several S-units, so much so that it appeared like a signal devoid of noise, sure there was a little QSB and QRN, but the readability of the signal increased so dramatically that I was shocked to say the least.

Taking the cords and power conditioners out of the R-71A brought the noise levels back up...not every cord and not every conditioner made a difference and it took name brand power cords to the power conditioners and to the Icom to deliver this level of performance...a simple, shielded 14ga. cord that many recommend as being all one needs for your HiFi plugged into the wall was not good, it made the signal almost unreadable at times, even added to the chain it deteriorated signal quality over high performance power cords...

The thing that was most noticeable was that the signal strength from WWV stayed the same, it was the background noise, noise we Hams may just think of as noisy conditions, that fell away so dramatically, making copy of the time signals loud and clear.

I have never doubted the efficacy of power conditioning since that day.

At this juncture, though, the only particulars I remember are that there were various MIT and Tice power conditioners among others, and I cant remember what power cables I was experimenting with.

This proved to me that there is a level of performance that can be achieved if one works at it.

As always, YMMV.
 
Oh yeah, this house was relatively new with multiple dedicated lines in each room not connected to the office and it's computers or the rest of the living area...all large gauge and run according to the best thoughts of the late '90's, early 2000's.
 
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