Has a Power Conditioner Improved Your Sound?

I, too, had my doubts about power conditioning until I tried a Audioquest Niagara 1200. It did what ghdprentice mentioned, in revealing a lower noise floor allowing for more info to come forward, completing the picture, so to speak. 

Before that I tried Brickwall and some other brand that when compared, sounded better going straight into the wall outlet. 

All the best,
Nonoise

I primarily use them as surge protection. I have lighting/surge protection for the house, but add more for expensive equipment. Sound improvement? Haven’t noticed. YMMV. There are no a big RFI or EMI sources where I live and mains are clean. Nothing fancy, mostly in $200 range.

But effect may also depend on type of your equipment and how good are their power supplies. Some tube gear has pretty simply power supplies and may be more sensitive to the noise.

@jfrmusic

IsoTek is a good start to explore power conditioning. That’s all they do and they do it extremely well. There are so many approaches to cleaning incoming power, starting with dedicated power lines.

I’ve tried many popular and big brands power conditioners costing upto $20K. While they effectively lowers the noise floor, each of them added some sort of coloration. If you own a high resolution system, you can easily discern changes to overall transparency, tonality, dynamics, etc. each time you introduce a new element. While I appreciated the next level of reduced noise floor, I did not care for coloration being added to the sound.

Next, I decided to try transformer based power conditioning. To my surprise, it did some things better and more importantly added zero coloration. I have two dedicated lines in my audio room so that helps but plugging my electronics directly vs power conditioner netted in more transparency and increased dynamics. The longer I listened the more I was drawn into music. Music simply sounded more alive.. I was over the moon with what I was hearing for a fraction of price but more importantly, no coloration. Each note rendering effortlessly without accentuating any element around a central note. It’s more explosive on loud passages and quieter on quiet passages. The scale of the music is also more diverse, some recordings sound bigger, others smaller.

A good power conditioner reduces or completely eliminates unwanted RF and crud that comes in from the power grid. You need to find one that does it with least bit of coloration to the music.

@lalitk,

Which power transformer conditioner are you using? I don’t think you mentioned it in your response.