Power Conditioners: Myth, Magic, or Necessary

In my opinion, there is little doubt that the needs for power scrubbing is related to the power source in your area. It does vary from one area of the country to another. Urban areas are worst. If you live in a rural area and have few "dirty" users in your area, it is concievable that you may realize little or no improvement. Also, things depend on what you have in your house that may interject noise onto the line. If you have few, or no offending items, this would also lead to not hearing a difference.

While I generally maintain that differences in sound can be heard by most people, if an upgrade in power cord makes no difference to your ears, then IMO it is not a cost effective modification for you.

If I were you I would sell those power cords and enjoy the music, why upgrade if there is potentially no gain? Why do you feel you NEED power cords and possibly a power conditioner? is there something you don't enjoy about your sytem? Let me just say I am an avid PC fan but simply put if you can't discern the difference don't spend the money-it doesn't mean your less of an audiophile.

i have old power wedges and dedicated circuits - the improvement i have most noted is they help in the elimination of a static low level hum heard mostly when there is no music playing. i still have to float grounds and they do not not effect transformer hum. all in all a small gain for me.

Power conditioning CAN make all the difference in the world DEPENDING on the component. The only way to really tell is through trial and error. For example, my amplifier (Gamut D-200) does not really like bening plugged straight into the wall. I get deffinite improvement from the sound of the amp when it is plugged into a PS Audio 20 HC UO. My amp even sounds better plugged into a PS audio power plant (unfortunately I do not have a power plant big enough to really plug in into effictively, but I have experimented with my P300, the combo is amazing).

Anyway, my Ayre K-3x preamp is just the opposite. The Ayre much prefers being plugged into the wall and does not like power conditioning of a UO or power plant. The Ayre though does have a lot of power conditioning in the preamps design, and Ayre told me (though I did not 100% beleive them at the time) that I should just plug the preamp into the wall. After some experiementation, I came to the same conclusion.

KF