what does a power conditioner really do?

I had the same question. Asked a friend who is a nuclear, electrical and sound engineer who designs and builds (and sells) his own speaker, interconnect cables and AC power cables.
He intsalled an Audio Magic pulse gen ZX within my Amp to clean emi/rfi and had me buy a Furutech GTX-D duplex receptacle for my wall (look 'em up). Both were jaw dropping improvement. Cleaner signal, blackest background, greater imaging and wider, deeper, higher sound stage. The only other time I experienced this degree of improvement was the first time I spent a few grand on really good cables (his of course).. Would have taken a $20,000 amp AND speaker ugrade to notice as big a difference. Those 2 items above would set you back around $800.. Oh, I should mention I didn't really think I needed anything and liked my sound fine at the time. So.....

Ask Ralph Karsten of atma-sphere on what he recommends with his monster power amps. He will suggest an industrial power conditioner which was often used by military, laboratories, hospitals etc etc other across the planet. It’s called the elgar the unit is setup as 240 v input 117v output and connects to the breaker box.

These units are all discontinued. It has 3000va continuous output. And 15000va peak. It can run 2 Atmasphere MA-2 power amps and still have juice for all your dac and preamps. It has the fastest response time on the planet.

The unit is approx 200lbs.

I think they sell for 4000.00 dollars fully reconditioned.

This is a email msg ralph karsten sent 


They run off of 240V so you have to hook it up to your breaker box. You would then feed your audio room with the output of the Elgar. It has enough current to easily supply your entire room, even if you had a set of MA-2s.

It regulates AC voltage (no need for a variac) and uses a massive transformer to isolate the AC output. There is then a low distortion oscillator that is locked to the AC line frequency- the unit compares this oscillator to that of the output of the transformer and applies a correction signal to a feedback winding on the transformer. The result is a low distortion sine wave all the way up to full power, free of spikes. It puts **all** high end audio power conditioners to shame.


Ralph also mentioned these clean up 5th harmonic distortion waves. It also has the lowest distortion rating and the fastest response time.

If you are looking for a ac conditioner these are the ones to get.

Ive used a lot of different products in this category over the years, Tara Labs Power Screens were the best but they're NLA and hard to find used.  

I currently run a PS Audio P10 and it works great.  Solves several power issues I have in my state and provides some excellent diagnostics realtime and post event.  I bought mine new at 50% off retail from an authorized dealer...

As many others have emphasized, the quality of power into your home is important. I'd say equally (if not more so) important are the other devices in your house. Many audio components have some aspects of what a power conditioner does, built right into them. Other devices in your home can create significant electrical noise (think major appliances).

A power conditioner may offer the following features:
- Surge protection (MOV, avalanche, etc...)
- Power regeneration (very inefficient btw, if you care about your electrical bill)
- AVR (automatic voltage regulation)
- Voltage monitoring (may shut off power if voltage is too high/low)
- Isolation transformer (like in RGPC products, or an APC H15)
- RFI/EMI filtering, often with CMC's (common mode chokes)
- May provide balanced power (BPT, Equi=Tech)

I'm sure there's more, but I think that covers most power conditioners. I haven't seen much data about how effective they are in real world environments, or even controlled blind tests to show audible improvements. It's easy to create conditions to verify that the conditioner does what it advertises (i.e. feed it 100V, and it boosts it to 120V, or verify the surge protection meets the advertised specs), but knowing whether these conditions occur in your home or would even have any real noticeable effect on your equipment is a totally different story (and hard for anyone to say, because different people have such different equipment).