Amplifier is now off the Power Conditioner

"05-20-14: Mceljo
I think the Shunyata Triton is a bit of a stretch at $5k considering it would be an equal financial investment to the rest of my stereo gear combined, actually more. I would be interested to hear the difference, however."

The Cable Company should have a Triton to lend out for demo.

Powersupply conditioners are usually ok for equipment have regulated power supplies, sources like cdp's, phono stages, preamps tuners T/T etc;

But for most poweramp/s their output stages are not powered by regulated supplies, they're just rectified, these supplies need to be "stiff" (low esr) right back to the mains, and by introducing a power conditioner, they usually no longer remain "stiff" and the bass tightness will suffer in most cases, and sometimes the dynamics as well.

Only one poweramp I can think of that had a regulated supply for it's output stage, was the Naim 250, I'm sure there are a couple of others, maybe the big Halcro poweramp for memory as well.

Cheers George

Mapleshade Records sells a power strip conditioner which does not limit power and allows both amp and front end components to sound better and unconstrained.
Plug this strip into one of the AC wall sockets and then plug a Machina Dynamica Flying Saucer RFI/EMI blocker into the adjacent socket.
At modest cost you should easily hear a meaningful upgrade to overall performance.

Well I'm running my 200WPC 833C SET monoblocks off PS Audio P5 power regenerators, and they sound better WITH the regenerators. Because of the power draw of the amps, I need to use one P5 per channel, but the dynamics seem to be better with the regerators. Perhaps that's because of the low output impedance and 50 Amp peak power capability that PS Audio claims for these units.

The Midlife Crisis

Any amp of decent power that sounds better plugged into a power conditioner should be sold ASAP.

That may be a slight bit of hyperbole, but ask any reputable amplifier designer if you should plug their product into a conditioner. The answer will be universally - NO! (In fact, one reputable designer already responded to this thread, so you don't have to take my word for it.)

Virtually everyone I've come across in this hobby who has tried it themselves comes to the same conclusion as the original poster in this thread.

There are some that do less harm than others, and there are some parallel devices like RPGC you could get away with using, but you're going to waste money gaining almost nothing.

Funny story...I had an argument on this topic with the designer of a power conditioner. We lived in the same town and I invited him to bring his $3.6k conditioner over, and we would test it. He was in the local audiophile group and they made a whole meeting around it. Others brought different power conditioners to try and guess what...

My system never sounded worse...In fact, one of them was choking my amps so bad that it was nearly unlistenable. Funniest thing is that they never stayed around long enough to hear my system with the amps plugged straight into the wall. They just packed up their 30-50lb conditioners and left. I'm sure some of them didn't want to admit being wrong, so they blamed my system for the poor audio instead of it being due to every single power conditioner.

Nevertheless, I knew what my system sounded like without conditioners on the amps, and the A/B testing on numerous conditioners gave me great confirmation of what every amp manufacturer says.