Who has dumped the power conditioner?

Lessloss

What is "skin"?

Elizabeth, you said "I have noticed the benefit of a using a very long extension cord, as the same benefit as dedicated lines. Get a 50' extension cord 12 or 14 gauge. It will equal the benefits of dedicated lines.. (just do not coil it up!)"
I'm new to Audiogon, and have a lot of catching up to do. Extention cord = dedicated line???? Wow. If that's true, I like the idea a WHOLE lot. First, does it matter if the extention cord is made of any particular quality cable, or just any heavy (12 or 14) extention cord, of which I have several around the house. Second, I understand the merits of not coiling it, but how the heck to you manage that?
Thanks.

Bob Cohen

Sme10 - I recently installed Furman 20PFi conditioner. It has three banks of outputs: for high current amps, for audio, for video. I connected my components accordingly. After 1 day of pretty muffled sound dynamics came back, imaging got more focused, midrange opened becoming more detailed, bass is more "even" (midbass resonant frequency disappeared)and shorter but still "punchy" (lower source impedance?). The really strange thing is that my DLP TV picture got much better (sharper, cleaner and more vivid colors). That was pretty much what Furman was promising but it doesn't make much sense (digital OTA signal, digital TV). The only explanation is that presence of noise on power lines (or interaction audio-video) was causing signal jitter (noise in time domain). In addition I sleep better since Furman has non-sacrificial overvoltage protection that clamps at 188V max (not around 300V like many power strips with protection).

IMHO any situation that resulted in better dynamics, fullness, detail and focus AFTER removing the power conditioner, was the result of a power conditioner lacking head room. Speaking from my own personal experience, that would NOT be the case with a Silver Circle Audio pure power one 5.0. Game changing gear, this stuff. Check them out at www.silvercircleaudio.com.

Timztunz, I think that you are right on about most power conditioners lacking headroom. It looks like the Silver Circle Power One 5 is just a very large transformer. I think that others, such as Synergistic Research have found more innovative methods to avoid constriction.