Am i missing something without a power conditioner?

@tattooedtrackman fear not you’ve not wasted a cent. The effect of improving the AC to your equipment is cumulative. From the breaker box all the way to the IEC on the component, upgrades at every step can pay dividends.

I will not not offer any opinion on which conditioner might suit you best, you can look at my system to see what I use. However I will offer that if you do get a conditioner you can further improve things by tweaking the feet and base it sits on. Conditioners and AC supplies in general are susceptible to vibration induced interference and using solutions to deal with this will pay back. In my case adding a Marigo sub platform under my conditioners was a very positive improvement. It’s certainly not the case that you just want to slap them on the floor and forget about it

sorry if this only adds to your confusion but the tweaks and anal attention to every detail are what makes this hobby fun

• @tattooedtrackman, yes there is a lot to consider. I believe if you have good components you will benefit from upgraded power cords.
  

Ultimately you will also benefit from some type of good power conditioning. Here is one video on YouTube, be patient and put up with the beginning drab of Kevin Deal, once the video moves into his store he does a good job of explaining the need for power conditioning. A good sounding system begins with clean power and/or can’t be achieved totally without clean power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxFFfw7K5rw

Ralph, very few real audiophiles want an industrial, discontinued power regenerator, especially one that would or might need service from a company that really doesn’t care about the consumer market way too impractical.

The Elgars I mentioned are not regenerators. Plus you can get them cheap, and service isn’t that hard- we’ve serviced a number of them and so has Michael Percy (known for selling high end precision parts).

Here’s one that can do 1KVA:

https://www.ebay.com/p/Elgar-6006B-Series-6000b-AC-Line-Conditioner-XLNT/841727168?iid=263635111143&...

The thing is, they are so much better than anything offered to high end audio that essentially the ’high end audio’ stuff is roundly embarrassed.

Of course you can’t know that if you haven’t experienced it. Sort of like trying to convince a 4-year old the value of brushing their teeth.

A passive conditioner can’t really do the job. The problems you are dealing with is of course spikes and high frequency noise, most of which is easy to filter, but also you have harmonics of the AC line frequency (distortion), DC on the line, and finally the raw AC voltage.

The 5th harmonic (300Hz) is known to be particularly troublesome (it is caused by transformers like those on power poles that are loaded past about 50% of their capacity). It causes power transformers to become mechanically noisy and run hotter, causes power rectifiers to become noisier and causes a reverse force to appear in synchronous motors (used in turntables and tape machines). Fluke Instruments published a paper on this over 25 years ago. Its not like its anything new, but most ’high end audio’ conditioner manufacturers won’t even know what you’re talking about if you bring it up. You can see though that just using an isolation transformer as part of your passive scheme can introduce harmonics if you load it too heavily!

That takes a bit of magnetics (very large chokes) to filter passively! There is an attendant voltage loss- so that technique is impractical.

DC on the line (often caused by electric heaters running at less than full power) causes transformers to become mechanically noisy due to core saturation. This also means their output waveform is distorted, which is not good for rectifiers. This is of course cheap to remove by itself.

Finally, if the line voltage sags, amplifier power can be severely curtailed and distortion higher. This can mess with the regulator overhead in preamps and sources like CD players. Modulation on the AC line can result in added distortion. Again this is something that no passive can sort out.

To add insult to injury, most passive units force the user to use the power cord supplied by the passive conditioner. Obviously the conditioner has to get power, but if it can’t compensate for the losses in the power cord, it isn’t helping.

This is why the Elgar is so good at what it does- it deals with all these problems. That no-one in high end audio has chosen to use their techniques is embarrassing. It would be expensive, but not if an audiophile is already willing to pay $1000 for a power cord or flush $$$$ away on ’conditioners’ that don’t do anything.

@uberwaltz - 

Fan Boy Prattle?
So one is to assume that we include your recommendation of the Panamax in the same category then ieales?

Absolutely. I stated I installed a Panamax and it was a significant upgrade. Other devices were better and worse. AND the user MUST audition anything.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, systems are as individual as a fingerprint. Identical systems in different rooms can sound vastly different. ALL components MUST be auditioned in situ. Device specifics are next to worthless in an absolute context.

Tattloe iam planning to connect my Dac, transport, CD player , and preamp. Lak Iam looking into the niagara 5000 n thunder pc....or maybe start with niagara 1000...