Is an isolation transformer better than a power conditioner?

@boostedis 

Thanks for your comments.

I have heard this claim of “just different”.. or even about a realization after some time it wasn’t good. But it has always sounded like it was coming from a skeptic… a theoretical assertion… not from the experience of a real audiophile.

Over the last fifty years of being an audiophile it has certainly never happened to me. Differences in sound the sounds of high quality interconnects, cables, and power cords are easy to hear… although it may take a little while to clearly articulate them. Also absolutely reproducible and consistent across components.

However,  fooling around with the stuff that comes with inexpensive equipment, Bilken, Blue Jeans, Monster, and the like can be confusing and difficult to pick out the differences. But good quality purpose built for sound equipment is seldom difficult.

I recently heard a Stromtank power regenerator in a very familiar high end system. It was good to see/hear that it didn't color or change the presentation, just cleaned up the grunge. It is a good unit, though expensive.

The whole system including the active ATC 100 speakers was connect via Stromtank.

With a dedicated AC line I’d be tempted to say "leave it at that," but the balanced power approach some have mentioned here has me intrigued. To those who have experience with it, how would describe its sonic influence compared perhaps to using power (re-)generators or other?

As I previously mentioned, balanced trans. just sort of there, doesn't add any flavor or artifacts like the other pc's I tried. Vs. dedicated lines without pc, larger soundstage, greater image dimensionality and specificity, higher resolving, greater transparency. When I go back to straight out of wall, soundstage and image collapse, pretty bad.

I've also tried Lithium Ion battery packs, nice for lowering noise floor, but dark flavor always sets in over time. Never liked any pc with every tube amp I've owned.

@ghdprentice Haha, I use Blue Jeans cables to great affect in my rather resolving system! Many of the highend brands use Belden cable as the basis for their own (fancy jackets and dielectrics) cables and the buyer is none the wiser! As I said, before, at a particular level of clear and transparent sound (I have that in spades) focused and deep soundstage where the speakers cease to be identifiable as the source of the sound (I have that in spades), micro detail that is easily heard vs other systems that do not resolve as well or present such sonic cues as being common to true highend setups (I have that is spades); I don't personally see how one can claim that the change was so profound that the adjectives used are so extreme. If you had a wide/deep/detailed soundstage before, claiming that it was expanded so greatly with some new accessory seems dubious to me. A collapsed soundstage to me is just that, it ceases to give you the impression of the sound coming from behind the plane of the speakers, etc. Deeper is one thing, but many would have you believe that it wasn't present before, and it miraculously now is....