General Asylum

Posted by Michael Samra (D) on March 10, 2008 at 14:38:14

In Reply to: RE: Power conditioner - consumer, professional, or not at all? posted by RGA on March 10, 2008 at 12:18:15

Guys
before you condemn or promote power conditioners its important to realize that there is a plain power conditioner and the Balanced power conditioner.The balanced power is the one you want..
I'm one of the biggest skeptics when it comes to new things because so many things are nothing but snake oil such as 1000 dollar and higher power cords and gold element fuses.I test everything with a distortion analyzer and scope and waveform analyzer to verify what I hear,and to make sure that it did in fact make a justifiable change.
In the case of the balanced power conditioner, I had brought it home and hooked it up and all of a sudden the sound was very anemic,lacking in dynamics and punch so I immediately disconnected everything from it but I did leave the unit plugged in..This is a panamax 5500.
Anyway I own a huge collection of vintage tube gear and one day I was working on one of my Knight Kb85 power amps with el37s and I had gone to plug the rca jacks into the amp from the preamp and I got the WORST 120vac shock I ever got in my life.It grabbed me and wouldn't let me go until it blew the fuse in the amp.What had happened was the Martin logan Descent sub has a switch mode power supply and going thru a preamp created a potential between the Knight amp and the sub ..It was only with the knight amps tho and I have 3 of them.
Anyway I thought this would be a great time to hook the balanced power back up because it is at least an isolation transformer if nothing else.When I hooked it up,the amp sounded very good like it always did but even more refined plus it wasn't losing any dynamics like the citation 2 did the when it was first hooked to it when I first got the power unit.
I decided to hook the cit 2 back up and sure enough it sounded wonderful going thru the balanced power conditioner.The only thing I can think of is there was a break in time on the Bal Power Cond. and maybe it had to learn the power line at my home and set parameters accordingly.
On with the test..I let the cit 2 play for 4 hours straight and it was powering my Martin Logan Monolith 2 ESLs at full throttle and if you know anyone that owns a citation 2,they will tell you they run super hot and this one was no exception..With the BPC tho,it ran 36 degrees cooler and when I tested the power and distortion levels on my Tektronix AA501 and my sencore SC61,the power went up 6 watts and the distortion dropped by 2 tenths of a percent at 1khz all plugged into the BPC.
I then became more curious than ever so I looked at the 60cps wave form coming out of the wall and it was AWFUL..It was symetrically clipped top and bottom on the sine wave and I thought WOW,this what was going into my equipment so when I looked at the wave form out of the BPC,it was accolades better and then I realized why the amps would run much hotter out of the wall than thru the power conditioner..
Now remember to ask yourself,what happens when an electronic component heats up? Resistance goes up and therefore loses power as in the case with the power transformer running 36 degrees cooler.The transformer does supply the amp's energy so I want to make that transformer as happy as I can so it can do its job to the fullest.Your probably thinking thru all this,why bother? The reason I did was I needed to prove to myself why such a big improvement.
Now remember a power conditioner is a not a balanced power conditioner.You have to get a balanced power conditioner and not just a plain power conditioner.
One more thing I want to mention..Every time we have a power outage,the BPC senses the slightest change in voltage and goes into protection even before the power goes off..It does it within a fraction of a second.