26-Sep-2020, 23:24
You left out the obvious "test" which is often mentioned as showing a difference and that is whether the system sounds better later at night when demand, and noise, on the grid is lower than it is during the day.
Another day/night factor I've been told about is for people with solar power setups. Do they hear a difference when the solar cells are producing power and the inverter is active compared to when their cells aren't producing power and the inverter is inactive.
I hear day/night differences without a power conditioner that I do not hear with one.
@Pim : Please read your last sentence above. I'm sorry to see that you've left the discussion since you say you have "exited". It would be more interesting if you were actually "excited" :-)
The big problem with this challenge is that it doesn't involve "real world" conditions. If we want to know whether power conditioners make a difference, we really aren't interested in knowing whether we can make our sound worse by running devices from the same power circuit as our audio systems that we are never going to run while the system is playing. If you can generate audible noise that way, you don't need a power conditioner to fix that problem, you just need to stop running those devices from the same circuit as your system when you're listening to music. The real question is not whether you can add noise. The real question is whether the quality of the sound you hear under normal conditions is negatively affected by noise on the power line that you don't notice because that noise is always there and you don't normally hear your system without the presence of that noise. Day/night differences are one situation which indicate that noise on the power line can make a difference but it's not an A/B test and therefore many will say that the reported difference is due to other factors such as lower ambient noise levels (less traffic, etc) at night or differences in mood. There's really only one A/B test that counts and that's whether or not you hear a difference when you put a power conditioner between the wall and your devices but there is still a time delay involved there, you have to power down the system, unplug everything from the wall, plug them into the power conditioner, plug that into the wall, turn the conditioner on, and then power up all of your system components again. That time delay is enough for some people to discount the comparison on the basis of the short term nature of audio memory.
I've had mixed results with power conditioners. The first few I tried didn't help in the audio system, they robbed the system of dynamics which is a common complaint. I do, however, run a separate video setup in another room which at that time was not on a dedicated circuit as my audio system is. When I used a conditioner that I thought made things worse in the audio system in the video setup, I tended to find it made an improvement which I put down in part to the fact that there were a lot more digital devices in the video setup (flat screen TV, AV receiver, DVD/BD player, Apple TV) while my audio system only had a CD player (I didn't have my Devialet back then and was using a totally analog integrated amp) and in part to the fact that a lot of household devices such as a refrigerator were connected to the same circuit. It wasn't until I tried a PS Audio power plant that I found a conditioner I thought didn't rob the audio system of dynamics and actually improved dynamics but then the PS Audio conditioners have storage capacity that enables them to deliver more power than they can draw from the wall for short periods when required, just as our amps have storage capacity that enables them to deliver more power than they can draw from the wall quickly when power is needed for loud transients.
One of the interesting things about the PS Audio power plants is that they have an info screen which displays things like incoming and output voltage (they also provide voltage regulation) and a figure showing incoming and output noise on the power line as a THD percentage. Both the incoming voltage and noise levels reported do change from day to night and the noise figure drops from around 2.4% during the day and early evening to around 1.4 to 1.8% later at night while the output figures are constant (0.1% for noise on the outputs). I'll accept that as proof that the power plants do make a measurable difference to the power being fed to the system. Whether or not that difference makes an audible difference to the sound you hear is another matter because, as has been pointed out in other threads here, the power supply in your components is supposed to deal with power "problems", and then there's the issue of what threshold level any noise has to be at before we can hear it. My personal experience with noise and also with the gradually lowering levels of all forms of distortion from our gear over the 5 and a bit decades I've been involved in this hobby is that we aren't aware of noise and distortion that we've always lived with, we only notice that we have been hearing sound affected by noise and/or distortion when that noise/distortion is removed. It's like eyesight, I didn't realise that I had mild astigmatism until I got my first pair of spectacles which included correction for that astigmatism and suddenly noticed that circles and squares looked different.
In the end, based on experience with a few power conditioners in both systems and taking into account the fact that my audio system has changed from having a CD player as the only digital device in the system to a system in which every powered device is now digital, I'd say that noise on the power line does negatively impact the sound that we hear and that power conditioners can make an improvement but many power conditioners aren't capable of meeting the power requirements of amplifiers. I'd also say, based on the increasing count of digital components in my audio system that while removing noise from the power line is beneficial, I think a bigger improvement comes with conditioners that actually isolate the components in your system from each other and prevent noise generated by one component being passed to another. Not all power conditioners are equally effective and while I believe they make a difference in my system I also think that if you're interested in trying them then you should borrow before you buy and try a few different models from different manufacturers. Depending on your local power grid and the components in your system you are likely to find that some conditioners are more effective than others.
YMMV
Another day/night factor I've been told about is for people with solar power setups. Do they hear a difference when the solar cells are producing power and the inverter is active compared to when their cells aren't producing power and the inverter is inactive.
I hear day/night differences without a power conditioner that I do not hear with one.
@Pim : Please read your last sentence above. I'm sorry to see that you've left the discussion since you say you have "exited". It would be more interesting if you were actually "excited" :-)
The big problem with this challenge is that it doesn't involve "real world" conditions. If we want to know whether power conditioners make a difference, we really aren't interested in knowing whether we can make our sound worse by running devices from the same power circuit as our audio systems that we are never going to run while the system is playing. If you can generate audible noise that way, you don't need a power conditioner to fix that problem, you just need to stop running those devices from the same circuit as your system when you're listening to music. The real question is not whether you can add noise. The real question is whether the quality of the sound you hear under normal conditions is negatively affected by noise on the power line that you don't notice because that noise is always there and you don't normally hear your system without the presence of that noise. Day/night differences are one situation which indicate that noise on the power line can make a difference but it's not an A/B test and therefore many will say that the reported difference is due to other factors such as lower ambient noise levels (less traffic, etc) at night or differences in mood. There's really only one A/B test that counts and that's whether or not you hear a difference when you put a power conditioner between the wall and your devices but there is still a time delay involved there, you have to power down the system, unplug everything from the wall, plug them into the power conditioner, plug that into the wall, turn the conditioner on, and then power up all of your system components again. That time delay is enough for some people to discount the comparison on the basis of the short term nature of audio memory.
I've had mixed results with power conditioners. The first few I tried didn't help in the audio system, they robbed the system of dynamics which is a common complaint. I do, however, run a separate video setup in another room which at that time was not on a dedicated circuit as my audio system is. When I used a conditioner that I thought made things worse in the audio system in the video setup, I tended to find it made an improvement which I put down in part to the fact that there were a lot more digital devices in the video setup (flat screen TV, AV receiver, DVD/BD player, Apple TV) while my audio system only had a CD player (I didn't have my Devialet back then and was using a totally analog integrated amp) and in part to the fact that a lot of household devices such as a refrigerator were connected to the same circuit. It wasn't until I tried a PS Audio power plant that I found a conditioner I thought didn't rob the audio system of dynamics and actually improved dynamics but then the PS Audio conditioners have storage capacity that enables them to deliver more power than they can draw from the wall for short periods when required, just as our amps have storage capacity that enables them to deliver more power than they can draw from the wall quickly when power is needed for loud transients.
One of the interesting things about the PS Audio power plants is that they have an info screen which displays things like incoming and output voltage (they also provide voltage regulation) and a figure showing incoming and output noise on the power line as a THD percentage. Both the incoming voltage and noise levels reported do change from day to night and the noise figure drops from around 2.4% during the day and early evening to around 1.4 to 1.8% later at night while the output figures are constant (0.1% for noise on the outputs). I'll accept that as proof that the power plants do make a measurable difference to the power being fed to the system. Whether or not that difference makes an audible difference to the sound you hear is another matter because, as has been pointed out in other threads here, the power supply in your components is supposed to deal with power "problems", and then there's the issue of what threshold level any noise has to be at before we can hear it. My personal experience with noise and also with the gradually lowering levels of all forms of distortion from our gear over the 5 and a bit decades I've been involved in this hobby is that we aren't aware of noise and distortion that we've always lived with, we only notice that we have been hearing sound affected by noise and/or distortion when that noise/distortion is removed. It's like eyesight, I didn't realise that I had mild astigmatism until I got my first pair of spectacles which included correction for that astigmatism and suddenly noticed that circles and squares looked different.
In the end, based on experience with a few power conditioners in both systems and taking into account the fact that my audio system has changed from having a CD player as the only digital device in the system to a system in which every powered device is now digital, I'd say that noise on the power line does negatively impact the sound that we hear and that power conditioners can make an improvement but many power conditioners aren't capable of meeting the power requirements of amplifiers. I'd also say, based on the increasing count of digital components in my audio system that while removing noise from the power line is beneficial, I think a bigger improvement comes with conditioners that actually isolate the components in your system from each other and prevent noise generated by one component being passed to another. Not all power conditioners are equally effective and while I believe they make a difference in my system I also think that if you're interested in trying them then you should borrow before you buy and try a few different models from different manufacturers. Depending on your local power grid and the components in your system you are likely to find that some conditioners are more effective than others.
YMMV
Roon Nucleus+, Devilalet Expert 140 Pro CI, Focal Sopra 2, PS Audio P12, Keces P8 LPS, Uptone Audio EtherREGEN with optical fibre link to my router, Shunyata Alpha NR and Sigma NR power cables, Shunyata Sigma ethernet cables, Shunyata Alpha V2 speaker cables, Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack, RealTRAPS acoustic treatment.
Brisbane, Qld, Australia
