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In Reply to: RE: Power conditioners-Do they work? posted by anton90125 on September 21, 2007 at 02:28:22
I too was skeptical until I spoke with enough people about the higher end conditioners such as the Silver Circle Audio Pure Power units & the Isoclean transformer based units. I recently purchased a Pure Power 5.0 and the difference is notciceable. It tightened up the bottom end (which was already quite good) and it removed the grunge caused by a less than optimum electrical source. I had a fairly good electrical source as I have dedicated electrical circuits with their own grounding device, but as soon as I hooked up the Pure Power 5.0 I noticed the noise floor dropped. This resulted in more clarity and air around each instrument.
These units are not for the faint of heart as they aren't cheap and weigh close to 100 puunds depending on the model chosen. I chose Silver Circle Audio as it contains everything needed in a bundled package including 4 high-end outlets for connection of 8 devices and a high-end power cord to connect to the wall. Both the 3.0 and 5.0 models share this feature. After speaking with Silver Circle's president, Dave Standard, I understood the incremental build parts value of the 5.0 and it swung my decision to the 5.0, even though I don't have demending power requirements as my main electrical requirements is a Jadis integrated 60 WPC amp (DA88S) and a USB DAC for my computer audio server system.
With Isoclean, everything is 'a la carte' and can add up to a hefty price and not such a tidy footprint as you end up with boxes and cables all over the place.
The other selling point was Dave Standard, the owner of Silver Circle Audio. After spending 10 minutes on the phone with him I was convinced that this is a person that is passionate about what he's doing and it translates to his products. He also wanted me to follow up with him and let me know my impressions of the unit. Check out his website and you'll see what I mean (http://silvercircleaudio.com/).
Good luck.
Follow Ups:
One of the reason I am asking the question is there is massive argument going on in http://whathifi.com/forums/t/2040.aspx . This is rapidly going balistic. The are a few posters who are trowing physics as a reason as to why we don't need power conditioners. That all the filtering is done in the power supply as built in the hifi unit. This forum "Whathif" is not as technical aware as here so I am wondering if there is any research into rf break through with regard to the power supply. If it could be shown that not all power supplies are the same then any argument that claims that you imagined a difference becomes null and void.
I use a variac as a filter as I saw many Hifi demonstrators use them at a hifi show. I did notice a difference and I was blind tested on it (being disabled I can not get round the back of my hifi to see how it is plugged).
"The are a few posters who are trowing physics as a reason as to why we don't need power conditioners."
Poor science. Science explains observations and offers predictions. It doesn't guarantee that something will happen a particular way. If something doesn't happen as predicted then either the observations on which the prediction was based were wrong or incomplete, something else happened to intervene, or there's a flaw in the theory. With long established scientific theory usually you bet on the theory being right and the observations wrong but scientific theory usually isn't worked out in the context of sonic differences in an audio system. I've yet to come across any basic scientific theory affecting electronics which had listening tests in an audio system as part of the research behind it.
If you had a perfect power supply in each component you definitely wouldn't expect a difference. While some component power supplies are better than others and some are extremely good, perfection is not something we tend to come across here or anywhere. If it's less than perfect it can be improved upon and power conditioning may help. Whether or not it will help depends on the quality of the power supplies in your components and the quality of the conditioner. You need to suck it and see and then, if you think a particular conditioner does make an improvement, decide whether that improvement is worth the cost of the conditioner to you or whether you would be better off forgetting it or spending the money elsewhere.
Beware people who tell you that science says something can't make a difference. That's not a sound scientific approach. Likewise beware people who tell you that you can rely on your ears and ignore the science. That's simply stupidity. You need both science and your ears and we all sometimes make mistakes, whether about the science or about what our ears tell us.
David Aiken
Howdy
But I might argue with an (irrelevant to the current discussion) implication of one of your statements a little :)
Serious science including listening DBTs are often used in audio (hearing aids, MP3 and other perceptual coding development, etc.) and much more than people apparently think in company's proprietary tests of audio hardware or audio processing algorithms. I suspect that there are a lot of companies that know more than they let on about what they've learned by doing good research in audio. (I also know that there are a lot of companies flying by the seat of their pants.)
-Ted
I'll wholeheartedly agree with your points on hearing aids, digital codecs, and the like, and also on some audio companies using listening tests in their product development; but what I said was:
"I've yet to come across any basic scientific theory affecting electronics which had listening tests in an audio system as part of the research behind it."
Perhaps I should have said 'electricity' rather than electronics. You're talking applied practice in audio related areas and I was trying to talk electrical theory of the sort that gets used to argue whether or not a power filter makes a difference. I definitely didn't any implication of my statement to get in the way of the truth of a statement like yours about particular applications which rely on listening tests of necessity since what counts in those cases is what people actually hear.
David Aiken
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