Power conditioners and power regeneration

The biggest fire danger is daisy-chaining cheap extension cords without fuses/breakers. That’s where your average home dweller or even office worker gets into trouble.

An outlet may provide 1800 W and those cheap extension cords, intended for lamps, may burn out after 600W. Try to daisy chain a few PC’s, printers, and a coffee machine and boom, fire.

Surge protectors want to be as close to the outlet as possible so that if they activate by shorting they dump as much current as possible through the home wiring. Any mediocre connections in between limit their effectiveness.

In addition, parallel mode surge protectors may short upstream components like other surge protectors, so having more than one surge protector in a chain is bad.

I get around all of this by:

• Using a voltage regulator that does not produce harmonics or noise and has a breaker
• Using Furman conditioners which have series mode (SMP) surge protection, and breakers
• Using hospital grade plug on the wall
• NOT using a UPS or regenerator

But like I mentioned, my gear was built up incrementally. If I had to do it again I'd have gone with the Furman with both voltage regulation AND power conditioning in one package.  

Been at this hobby for a long time trying all kinds of "improvements".  Other than protection from power surges, never thought much about power conditioning.  After all, each piece of gear powered by AC includes filtering to clean up the AC.  

Why did my system sound different in the daytime, evening, or day of the week?  It took a long time to be confident there really was a difference.  AC varied some, but surely a couple volts can't be the issue. 

Found a nice used PS Audio Power Regenerator to try.  Connected all my gear to the unit and picked a track with a piano passage harshness present every time.  Whoa - clear notes, no harsh edges.  Tried another track with some harsh edges.  Gone again, nothing but clean and clear notes.  Tried several more tracks. Same result.  Would not describe as jaw dropping difference, but no doubt harsh edges gone.  That was with solid state amp over several weeks.  During that period, time of day made no difference in the sound quality.

Switched to my tube amp. Spent a few weeks listening.  Again, no difference based on time of day.  Prior to the Power Regenerator the solid state amp and tube amp both sounded good, with not much difference.  After, the change in sound quality with the tube amp is substantial.  There is depth, body, and clarity not present previously.

As always, be your own judge of whether a different piece of gear or tweak works for you.

@jerrybj  , please let us know what you think of your PSM 156 .

When the El Nino weather pattern began to really kick in a few weeks ago in my area, I began to notice a slight uptick in sound quality deterioration during the hottest parts of the day when everyone's air conditioners were going full tilt. Late at night when temps calmed down the problem abated. It was a subtle problem to begin with, but for audiophiles subtle can be not so subtle. Know what I mean?

Over the years , I owned several different brands of Power Conditioners and wanted to settle on a conditioner that I could keep for the long haul.  The AudioQuest Niagara 3000 won me over and I never looked back.