Power direct from the wall, or Power Conditioner?

[Greg]

@thumb5 & @Pim

You're missing my point so I'll try to make it another way.

Here are the first 3 sentences of @f1eng 's post reproduced exactly except that I've changed the references to amplifiers to references to motor vehicles, and the references to mains power to references to roads conditions:

Given that a motor vehicle is designed to be driven on roads any competent designer should make it immune to any typical road shortcomings.
I would consider any motor vehicle which needed any sort of modification to perform correctly to be defective.
Anybody who worked for me designing motor vehicles which needed any modification for road conditions to work properly would be looking for another job.

I agree with the first sentence above which says that a competent designer or engineer should be able to design a vehicle immune to typical road problems.

Now look at the second sentence. It clearly says that "any motor vehicle" which would include a formula 1 racing car which needs any sort of modification, say to suspension, in order to deal with the road conditions, say those encountered on the Paris to Dakar motor rally or any other course conducted over extreme roads not encountered under normal conditions, is defective. The third sentence implies that the designer of that formula 1 racing car should be looking for another job because his car can't handle the Paris to Dakar rally course without modification.

It's one thing to say that a competent designer should be able to design a component that meets typical conditions. It's a very different thing to say that any component that can't deal correctly with every condition it may meet is defective, and to go from there to saying that a designer that didn't do that should be sacked. On that basis, f!eng should have been sacked for designing formua 1 racing cars that would need modification to deal with the requirements of the course of the Paris to Dakar rally even though they were superbly capable of doing the job they were designed to do which was to deal with race track conditions, not every road condition.

Products aren't designed to deal with every conceivable condition which may be encountered, they're designed to deal with a specific range of conditions. Some conditions which can be met require modification of the product if you want good performance.

As for power conditioning in audio, well maybe it should be looked at as something akin to the modifications that many audio enthusiasts make to their cars in order to get better performance of some kind from them. The car is their hobby and they make modifications of all kinds for all reasons. Is the car they bought defective because they want to make some sort of modification to meet their own personal performance preferences? Should the designer of the car they bought be looking for a new job because he didn't design a car that could handle every performance demand any purchaser at all might make of it without modification? The original cars weren't defective and their designers shouldn't be sacked. There are very very few products of any kind available that can't be improved in some way by some modification or add on device if someone is chasing some kind of performance gain that wasn't catered for in the original design because no original design caters for every performance demand someone may have, and anyway, audio enthusiasts like to tinker with their audio systems in the same way as auto enthusiasts like to tinker with their cars.

I rest my case. The statements made in f1eng's second 2 sentences in his original post specify a much higher standard than that in his first sentence which is quite a reasonable standard to expect. Unfortunately the standard required by the following sentences is simply unreasonable when no product is ever going to be designed to deal with every situation and satisfy every user's expectations. My response was about the difference in standards being called for in the first sentence and the subsequent sentences.

Your car analogy is inappropriate to the case in hand. The only part of the car equivalent to the power supply is the fuel filler hatch.
We aren't going to agree, fitting a fancy gold plated cap on your fuel filler is equivalent to putting a fancy mains anything for your stereo to plug into.

Generally I agree with F1eng. I think many power conditioners are a waste of money. However, I do use an Airlinks balanced power transformer, to which I have fitted a DC blocker because I have measured DC on my mains and blocking it stops the balanced transformer from buzzing (the transformer itself will not pass the DC current on). This supply I use certainly brings more life and vigour to the sound. Any other filtering system I have tried has simple squashed the sound and made it dull. YM(and the content of your wallet)MV.