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Power Conditioning on the Cheap

This is my first post here after a bit of lurking, so please be gentle.  I realize this subject must come up a fair amount and I've read erik_squires blog posts on the subject, but I was hoping to get the community's opinion on the relative merits of a few relatively basic power conditioners.  I've narrowed my list down to a few options at a range of (fairly modest) price points.  From low to high they are:

Furman PST-8D

ifi Power Station

Furman Elite-15 PF I

Shunyata PS10 w/ Venom Defender

Audioquest Niagara 1200

In a perfect world where I didn't have a limited budget I would probably buy something higher up the line from Shunyata, but since we live in a decidedly imperfect world, these are my options, although I would welcome other suggestions that fit within this price range.

I should also probably mention that while I value subjective reports on the sound quality of various products, generally speaking I give more weight to objective measurements or at least arguments based in sound science.  More embarrassingly, I also place a certain amount of value on aesthetics.  Aesthetic taste being inherently subjective, (a debatable point, but for the sake of argument lets just assume that it's true) lets just say that when I lust after completely unobtainable equipment it tends to be from companies like Soulution or Pilium rather than Dan D'Agostino or darTZeel.

incorporeus

Showing 1 response by rudyb

rudyb
141 posts
 

From your text it sounds you already decided you want to buy a Power Conditioner. My questions is ... is there something wrong / missing with your current sound that pointed you in this direction as being the solution?

It could be that maybe if you change another component, or improve room acoustics, experiment with speaker placement or port (if they have them) tuning, improvements can be made that have more impact for the same or less investment than adding a power conditioner, which will probably only make a subtle audible difference, if any at all.

Since you say you have this budget cap, other solutions could be more money efficient. But of course the high tech looks and ’estheatics’ of a power conditioner added to your rig may give a nice feeling and may be worth something too.

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