AC Power


I have a relatively nice system, but have done nothing with my AC power, with the exception of upgraded PC’s and a cheap iFi plug in power conditioner. My question is multi fold… do I need to do something, and if so what? Dedicated line (15A or 20?)? Quality power conditioner? Both? Which one first? How do you tell?

My system is a combination of HT & 2 channel & I tend to use both simultaneously as I like to watch sports while listening to music.
My amp is (I think) a relatively low draw… Moon 330A, Rythmik sub, BHK pre, Aurender, Qutest w/Sbooster, R11’s. No high power amps are in my future & never listen above 75db. I do currently plug my amp directly into the wall. All my wall warts are gone. For my HT, add a 75” Sony TV, Marantz 7015 AVR & a Klipsch sub (although at zero volume the AVR & sub should not come into play).

I am considering buying the Furman IT-Reference 15i or 20i first as they are well reviewed & are priced very well on Amazon ($1,400 / $1,900). Before I pull the trigger, should I go dedicated power & at what amperage (my nephew, an EE & audiophile thinks I am drawing no more than 5 amps) as that will dictate the Furman model?

Interesting, my nephew thinks neither are worth the investment. His statement: “Do you have appliances on the circuit now? What kind of interference can they inject?...voltage drops would come from current draws...which trip breakers.
Not steady 60hz a good power supply handles. So it all comes back to was the power supply engineer dropped on his head as a child.”

”Personally I think it’s something audio people do when they have run out of gear to buy.”

Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

signaforce

Thanks, @jea48 , that explanation and illustration made it so perfectly clear that even I could grasp it.  

@erik_squires - Speaking of voltage regulation, any difference between this and this, other than $1,400?  It seems 15A should mostly be enough for digital front end, if not all front end components.

If you are gonna spend good money on power conditioning, get a good warranty, then use it to see if you have an improvement in SQ.  If not, well, lots of us haven't been able to tell the difference.

@mitch2

There is a very good chance that digital front end equipment already has voltage regulators on the DC power side of the equipment. Good chance that holds true on at least solid state preamps. Maybe even for tube preamps.

As for digital equipment the question is, does the equipment have filtering on the AC mains side that will filter out, prevent, digital hash from traveling back out on the power cord and re-interring on the power cords of an analog preamp and power amp that are plugged into a common power strip.? Even if the amp is plugged directly into the same wall outlet, same branch circuit, as the power strip.

There was a well respected EE, his field was in electronics, that passed many years ago. He frequently posted on the AA forum. I remember he used to say the main reason, (paraphrasing what he said), for multiple dedicated branch circuits is to decouple the power supplies of digital equipment from analog equipment.

That’s why I installed two dedicated 20A branch circuits. One for digital equipment, the other for analog.

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