Power Conditioners: Why different inputs?

[Speedskater]

I have been told by people in areas with a lot of surges that their Furman surge protectors have tended to work slightly better than other MOV surge protectors.

One wonders how 'people' arrive at that conclusion?

 

[JohnYang1997]

Noise in AC power line does literally nothing. It will be lost in transformer and any power supply filtering.

 

[Clive of Sweden]

I thought I would say what i have experienced in this field. Year's ago when England first got digital TV via antenna i had a pace TV box (Freeview now). It was really sensitive to interference from the mains electricity. If my mum opened the fridge the door the box would pixelate loose sound for a while, and sometimes need a reboot. I had a spare mains inline filter so I connected to the box and it fixed the problem. year's later i bought a tacima cs929 mainly for surge protection. I plugged it in as normal and noticed that the signal strength and quality meters on my Freeview box (not the old pace one) went up. So they do do something i have 3 of them now but I don't plug my amplifiers in to it.

 

[Chuckser]

So there are three explanations, none of which are mutually exclusive:

1. My hearing is terrible.
2. My gear is properly designed and doesn't pass through power line noise.
3. Power conditioners generally don't do anything to improve sound.

When I had my hearing tested last December, I was found to have acute hearing (equivalent to that of a small child except for a slight 4 kHz notch in my left ear), so explanation 1 is out.

Explanation 2 is a good bet, as I've unloaded all the finicky audiophile stuff I used to own.

Explanation 3 is also a good bet. (Ok, ok, some power conditioners do something, and when I engineered recordings, I used an immense Furman 20A voltage regulator to power mic preamps and A/D converter.)

Figure out how to do some blind tests of this stuff, and then please let us know how consistently you perceive the differences. No peeking!

Your equipment probably has an IEC filter included in the design. My neighbourhood was experiencing very low-quality mains electricity sometimes dropping to 180volts on occasion. I told my neighbors about the issue and why their AVRs were failing as a result of power surges. We were living at the top of a hill near a mobile phone mast, which was emitting into the electricity distribution grid. They all bought cheap power filter/surge protectors. I couldn't afford one at the time but as the houses are wired in series from the grid even I experienced a dramatic reduction in hiss and distortion. I had bought a 40watt integrated amplifier and the mains was so fuzzy it was effecting the "Power Factor" at the transformer and downstream circuits such that the amp was incapable of driving any load, whatever. Have you ever compared battery power to mains powered equipment? There is a huge and easily discerible difference.

 

[egellings]

I have this Dynavox X7000 power conditioner and it has 6 inputs. Four of them are filtered the manual says, two are unfiltered. The analogue devices need to go in the unfiltered, the digital devices (cd player, dac etc) need to go in the filtered. Can anyone explain why this is? I thought it would have been best if everything is filtered? Filtered = cleaner so especially for the amp, but this is not the case?

It's also the case with the Vincent PF-1 Power Conditioner and probably more? Only Vincent calls it the analogue and digital inputs. The manual can be read here: https://www.vincent-tac.de/fileadmin/pdf/BDA/Powerfilter/BDA_PF-2_DE_EN_FR.pdf

It's possible that the digital products generate HF noise from switch-mode supplies and amplification, and this might get transmitted back into the AC power outlet, while that type of noise is absent from all analog equipment that uses non switch mode power supplies. So the digital outlets get filtered, and the analog ones simply don't need it.