power conditioner

@falconquest 

Poor choice of words on my part in my prior post. Please accept my apologies.

I had a knee jerk reaction given that in your previous post you had mentioned balanced power. I didn't hear anything in the video explain or otherwise address that. Additionally, while you did mention the Audio Quest Niagara, the OP mentioned he/she is looking for a solution of "reasonable cost". IMO the Audio Quest Niagara series (any model) doesn't meet that criteria. 

I read many threads guys claiming that plugging their amp into anything other than the wall outlet "sucks the life out of it" whatever that means?

Power conditioners are tricky. Many of them force you to use its power cord which is not good if you have higher powered amps as there can be a voltage drop across the cord that can affect the amp (and reduce its total power).

If the conditioner has magnetics in it, often you don't want to run it past 50% of its maximum rating as it can introduce distortion, which is not good for most power supplies.

So far the best power conditioners we've seen were made by Elgar, who was making them for commercial/industrial applications. They can regulate the AC voltage and have no more than about 1% distortion running at their maximum current rating- the most common model handles about 28 amps continuous! They blow all the conditioners mentioned so far as well as a lot that have not right out of the water.

The one problem though it that they are noisy, as they employ cooling fans for the feedback amps in the conditioner. The way they work is they have an enormous isolation transformer inside that does the heavy lifting. This transformer has a feedback winding that also is employed as a bucking winding. The feedback amp is fairly high power, and takes its signal from a comparator circuit that compares the output to a low distortion 60 Hz oscillator that is synchronously locked to the AC line frequency. 

Elgar does not make these units anymore as the commercial conditioner market dried up a long time ago. So they usually have to be rebuilt when you find them, which is usually on ebay. If you pay $3500 for the unit plus refurbishment you are in the ballpark. The way to use them is to have them power the AC lines that feed your audio room and have the unit near your breaker box, wired in by an electrician. 

The upside is that they are the very best available price no object, and by comparison all the high end audio conditioners we've seen are so much junk.

Here is a lower powered version that can do about 10 amps:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ELGAR-6006B-LINE-CONDITIONER-57-63Hz-115VAC-6000B-SERIES-1kVA-WORKS-GREAT/2...

@atmasphere

Always a pleasure to read from you in any thread.

Could you please provide your opinion (succinctly) about balanced power conditioners, with an emphasis on whatever advantage they bring to the table in comparison to non-balanced conditioners?

@atmasphere 

Always appreciate your input. So, as Elgar is not available anymore, what brands/models do you know of that work well?

Could you please provide your opinion (succinctly) about balanced power conditioners, with an emphasis on whatever advantage they bring to the table in comparison to non-balanced conditioners?

Balanced power is nice if you can pull it off without introducing other problems. It is useful for lowering susceptibility to noise on the line. Often it is done by using an isolation transformer of some sort. If this is the case, the transformer should not be operated past 50% of its continuous rated power (else distortion will be a problem and that will overshadow any advantage brought by balancing the power).