Power Conditioners: Audioquest Niagara 5000 or Shunyata Denali 6000S

Hi Skyscraper,

In a week I should be able to provide a more informed comparison that may be of some interest to you on the Shunyata v. Audioquest issue, but right now I have in house both an Audioquest Denali 5000 and the latest Shunyata Triton v3, which I am comparing to my current Purepower 3000+.  

As of this time, I have not had enough time to give thoughts on the Shunyata, but I was not impressed by the Audioquest.  Like pretty much every serial filtering conditioner I have tried, it presents a mixed bag of audio qualities.  In my system, it constrained the soundstage, bringing everything forward towards the plane of the speakers, and produced a more pronounced lower midrange.  If one's system is laid back, it may provide the sense of more excitement or jump factor, but I found it fatiguing. 

Caveat 1 - I only use power conditioners on front end components, not amps
Caveat 2 - my default power setup is pretty good, with all dedicated AC lines wired with Cardas in wall cable and Oyaide R-0 outlets, with an Eritech 10ft chemical grounding rod surrounded in bentonite clay.

Clean power is a beautiful starting point.  

Rzado, to be sure I’m not misreading you, you’re meaning the Audioquest Niagara 5000 aren’t you. I think you got a typo in there. I’m interested in how the two compare when you finished demoing both in your system. That’s good information on the Audioquest you’ve provided. Keep us posted. You’ve done a more thorough job wiring than anybody else I’ve run across. Must have been a fair amount of work.  I’ll be watching for your next post. Thanks,

Mike

@skyscraper, here are some thoughts on running romex or other rather simple cable directly from your breaker box to your conditioner vs running a high end purpse designed audio power cable from a wall socket to your conditioner.  From a current perspective, direct connection would be great.  From the perspective of any EMF around that cable that might interfere with other cables in the vicinity, perhaps not the best solution.  

Same goes (especially) for using budget power cables from a conditioner to your gear.  Why I hear you saying.  You just spent $4,000 to tidy up your power, so now its all good, right?  Yes and no, and the reason is that a power conditioner cleans up the power from the street, but can’t protect your low voltage/current signals in cables like IC’s and speaker cables from exposure to field effects from nearby high current power cables, even if the power running through those power cables is very “clean”.

As @inna says, good conditioning and good power (and other) cables work together, removing noise and reducing signal and field interactions, especially in crowded spaces near the back of each piece of gear or where low and high current wires come close to each other, cross, or heaven forbid, run in parallel.  Sorry to say its all potentially important.  

Best way to determine if it’s important enough for you to make additional investments is to try different power and other cables in your system once you select a conditioner.  Try the cable company lending library for a low cost way to trh before you buy.

I find that the better my gear gets, the bigger the benefits I hear from good power and other cabling. But frankly, good cables can make some even modest gear sound surprisingly better and good.

The better all your other cables are, the more likely your romex idea is to generate more potential benefits than penalties.