Should Amps be plugged into a power conditioner?

Direct hands-on comparison:

My system includes a pair of 220wpc amps driving an easy load (Harbeths). It always sounded OK, but never quite like what was promised by the most credible published reviews. Cable upgrades, room treatments, vibration mitigators, all made some difference, but I felt there should be more.

After extensive research, I added an Audioquest Niagara 5000 conditioner and full set of complementary AQ power cords. Invested about $7000 total. The transformation was dramatic. Holographic soundstage, more realistic imaging, and vastly improved reproduction of tiny details, such as room ambiance. Overall, one of the biggest sonic improvements I’ve experienced in any system I’ve ever owned.

And oh yeah, the addition of the conditioner also improved headroom. Yup, that’s right. Maybe it was just a matter of better transient response making everything sound punchier, but the improvement was dramatic..

The ponit is that every setup is different and a successful power-conditioning strategy calls for the research required to make an educated decision. In my case, I had a 7-year-old house with combined utility power & rooftop PV. No ground hum or aluminum wiring, but during the day, a lot of inverter noise. I blindly tried a few $3-500 power conditioners that were little more than surge protectors, and heard no difference. It wasn’t until I took the time to understand the technology that I had such profound results. I’d never consider running my system today without the AudioQuest power-conditioning in place. I’m sure that analogous Shunyata gear would also provide significant improvements.

Properly designed conditioners, like the sophisticated Niagara line do a lot more than reduce audible noise. One benefit of the Niagaras is that they effectively create reservoirs of power that provide the energy needed by an amplifier to reproduce peaks. Randomly matching a crappy $500 conditioner with a beefy, current-hungry amplifier can certainly limit dynamics. But if you take the time to do it right, you stand a good chance of greatly improving your sonics.

And the quality of your amplifiers doesn’t necessarily obviate the need for power conditioning. Michael Fremer himself still uses a Niagara front end for his Dartzeels (!), even after having his entire house wiring, all the way to the curb, replaced a few years ago.  Even running a dedicated line to your system can be effective, but in some cases, you need more.

Bottom line is that every system is different and every owner has to decide what type of power conditioning (or amended house wiring) is most cost-effective in his or her specific case. You can’t make an across-the-board statement one way or the other, even re:parameters like headroom, w/o first spending time on self-education and analysis on the order of the effort you’d make when shopping for speakers.

I speak from personal experience.

+1 Mesonto,

There will always be advocates for both cases (conditioner vs. directly to wall). In my system I have my amp directly to the receptacle, as I tried it through the Panamax M5300-PM where it collapsed the dynamics a bit....and seemed to compress bass speed. Signal components go through the Panamax.

What truly made a huge difference: 2 dedicated lines for the amp and the conditioner, high quality receptacles (Furutech GTX-D(G), Furutech GTX-D(R), and Oyaide R1), and upgrading my power cords away from my first Pangea power cords.

I suppose it depends about the power conditioner that is used, many do limit dynamics.

However, I have found that plugging my amps into my Niagara 7000 improves the dynamics, and overall sound quality over just plugging the amps into the dedicated wall outlet.

ozzy

Should they is a judgement call and I encourage you to test with your ears.

I have a Shunyata Delta power conditioner and plug my Moon 860AV2 into it.  I like the sound and I also appreciate the protection.  (I also have a whole house surge protector.)

Current limiting starts at the power cord. Any time you have a glorified power strip, like so many so-called 'power conditioners' seen marketed to the high end audio community, the power cord it uses will have a voltage drop.

We recommend to our customers that unless they have a real power conditioner (like the old Elgars, or possibly one or a pair of the higher powered PS Audio units) that they plug directly into the wall. This is not only because of the sole power cord issue I just mentioned but also because most of the 'power conditioners' we've seen don't do much at all or can have deleterious effect.

The guy doing the teardown at the link doesn't understand how the Elgar works and these date from the 1970s not the 1990s :) so they usually need refurbishment to be reliable (they are designed for 24/7 operation). Elgar got out of the conditioner market in the early 1980s. 

The Elgar is a good example how how power conditioning should be done. It has an enormous power transformer through which the AC line moves. It has taps for various power supplies for the low distortion oscillator, housekeeping circuits and the large feedback amplifier. The output of the transformer is compared to the oscillator which is sync'ed to the AC line frequency. The feedback signal thus generated is amplified and applied to the transformer, bucking its Voltage (IOW 'regulating') and correcting distortion; this is done without current limiting right to the upper limit of the unit's spec- in the case of the one at the link, about 30Amps!

The PS Audio Regenerators also use an oscillator and an amplifier, whose output is converted to the AC line voltage by a transformer. Feedback allows it to also maintain low distortion.

If your conditioner does not do these things its likely so much junk. It might help in low current applications for isolation (such as seen in the Furman units) where power amplifiers should not be involved. If you don't have active circuitry to allow the conditioner to maintain low distortion of the output AC waveform, its not really going to work. You may have had good results with whatever you're using, but if you have a real conditioner the results are far more palpable.