Interesting topic. Richard Vandersteen of Vandersteen Audio talked about this at one of his dealers in San Diego. He also came to the conclusion that the overall noise level was much less at night. Traffic, general daytime noise polution is much higher during daytime.
"But it sounds better at night...."
A well-traveled topic that I raise yet again. On the "are power regenerators snake oil" question, the response that has made most sense to me is: No, if you have some material issue with the power supply coming into your home. If you live in an area with what I will call normal modern power infrastructure, and have quality components, you will probably not notice a difference.
But I live in a city, do not suspect any power problems, and feel with a pretty high degree of certainty that my system sounds better at night. This is a common sentiment, attributed to more activity on the electrical grid during the day. Can these two positions be reconciled? Why DOES the system sound better at night to me and many others?
Is our perception straight-up wrong, and the result of some bias or non-auditory reason why listening at night is a better experience?
Maybe when listening at night, one average for most people, the system will have been on longer, and therefore be more warmed up?
Is our perception real, and supports the proposition that baseline electrical system usage does materially affect many systems, and you don't need a clear power "problem" to benefit from a regenerator?
Let's rehash it all again gentlemen!
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@aewarren it should say wash it. Lol
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I addressed power at the meter. Made sure everything was optimal without buying into fancy audio conditioners or the like. I do have whole house surge but after making sure the main service panel had no issues, set up a subsystem, tied to the main household ground using a large 10kVa iso transformer from Controlled Power. That feeds a sub panel adjacent to the music room using 4 gauge, and from the local sub panel, pulled 10 gauge dedicated lines. The system here sounds good. I think I benefit from newer grid infrastructure and even though I'm located very close to downtown Austin, no commercial operations are fed from my transformer. The system sounds the same, day or night. Much better than the power I had in the lower Hudson Valley, north of NY, which was ancient and prone to outages. The Texas grid is suspect though and I'll eventually install a whole house transformer- not for use on the audio system, but just to have power if we black out. All power solutions should start at the meter if not before (though unless you have pull with the local power authority, you aren't going to get a dedicated pole transformer). Start at the beginning, rather than adding bandaids. If you are in a condo or apartment you are far more limited.
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