Power Conditioners: Audioquest Niagara 5000 or Shunyata Denali 6000S

@skyscraper, here are some thoughts on running romex or other rather simple cable directly from your breaker box to your conditioner vs running a high end purpse designed audio power cable from a wall socket to your conditioner.  From a current perspective, direct connection would be great.  From the perspective of any EMF around that cable that might interfere with other cables in the vicinity, perhaps not the best solution.  

Same goes (especially) for using budget power cables from a conditioner to your gear.  Why I hear you saying.  You just spent $4,000 to tidy up your power, so now its all good, right?  Yes and no, and the reason is that a power conditioner cleans up the power from the street, but can’t protect your low voltage/current signals in cables like IC’s and speaker cables from exposure to field effects from nearby high current power cables, even if the power running through those power cables is very “clean”.

As @inna says, good conditioning and good power (and other) cables work together, removing noise and reducing signal and field interactions, especially in crowded spaces near the back of each piece of gear or where low and high current wires come close to each other, cross, or heaven forbid, run in parallel.  Sorry to say its all potentially important.  

Best way to determine if it’s important enough for you to make additional investments is to try different power and other cables in your system once you select a conditioner.  Try the cable company lending library for a low cost way to trh before you buy.

I find that the better my gear gets, the bigger the benefits I hear from good power and other cabling. But frankly, good cables can make some even modest gear sound surprisingly better and good.

The better all your other cables are, the more likely your romex idea is to generate more potential benefits than penalties.

You can get budget aftermarket power cables that provide over 50% of the improvements that SOTA cables provide at 1/10 of the price. The opposite of diminishing returns.  

Give the cable company your budget and tell them your gear and they may recommend an uneven distribution of costs between cables based on what they think will provide the biggest return.  Or look at Pangea cables from AudioAdvisor or Signal Cable as a place to start.  You may get the best results with the most expensive power cable on your CD player, difficult to prejudge.

Modest AQ IC is a good place to start for that.

Yes, I am referring to EMI.  I am not an electrical engineer so have only an audiophile’s interest in the subject and some trial and error experince under my belt including designing, assembling and using a few power cables.

That said I have experienced great benefits from power conditioning with audio in both dirty office environment, and with a relatively “clean” home power setting with dedicated circuit, breaker, 10 guage romex to high quality outlet.  

With the former, I could not get any kind of natural sound without separate power conditioners on the amp and then on all digital sources plus the sub.

At home I am running my amp and sub directly to dedicated wall outlets (few electric storms and power surges in my area), and all other analog and digital sources from dedicated outlet to qualty power strip with Shunyata Venom Defender which worked miracles on hum in my analog source and provides inky black backgrounds and good soundfield with no apparent reduction in speed of transients or slam for all sources.  My experience with this simple product should bode well for your use of the Denali.

I use a bunch of different cables including Shunyata Diamondback, but am very pleased right now using modestly priced digital and speaker cables from Audioquest and interconnects and power cables from Nanotec.  And I try to manage wires in the back to stay away from one another as much as is reasonable.  YMMV.

kn

The critcal issues for power cables are speed of current rise, current capacity, protection from external EMI and protection from creating excessive EMI.  Everything matters in this regard from to connectors to the conductors to the dialectric to the conductor configuration.  There are many different designs, and you just need to determine which is highest performing and cost effective solutions for you.

Typically, PCs for amps do not utilize shielding, while PCs for digital sources do.  

Shielding is used in digital power cables to effectively reduce RFI/EMI, important for keeping noise out of the cable, but also important to keep noise generated in your digital gear within the cable and harmlessly drained to ground.

Amp power cables typically do not incorporate shielding in order to maintain unrestricted macro and micro dynamics. Complicated geometries are often employed to concentrate the current towards the center of the conductor weave, providing some shielding from external sources, as well as mitigating radiation of RFI/EMI.