I get questions all of the time concerning the need for power conditioning and I seem to say the same things over and over and over....
Let me spread my mantra here as I have done, oh, so many times before. It may not be a sacred group of words, but it is a true group of words.
My journey to audio excellence really began back in the early 80's. I was a partner in a live sound company that provided sound reinforcement for many venues here in New Mexico. One of those venues was the Paolo Solari Amphitheater in Santa Fe and we were blessed to do sound for many great touring acts. From B.B King to Pat Matheny, Lyle Lovett, David Grisman and so many others. One of the problems was clean AC. We pig tailed directly into the panel, but the AC still sounded bad. We knew this because we were providing sound reinforcement services in other venues that sounded better with the same gear. Bummer. Fast forward a couple of years to my sojourn at Quincy Street Sound in Albuquerque. We were having an issue with power quality there. Mixes done at night sounded great... ones done during the day...? Not so much. It came down to us determining that the incoming AC was being contaminated by the printing shop, restaurant and dental lab during the day. Their vacuum pumps, sublimation printers and refrigeration units were screwing mightily with the power quality to the studio, even though we were on a standalone transformer. We recorded and mixed Sara K's Gypsy Alley there during the evenings. I still stand by that recording even though it was masters to a Sony U-Matic digital recorder... 14 bits and all. What a cool lady........
We started looking at isolation transformer and other solutions, but they were just band-aids. Mixing after 9:00 PM became the norm.
This bugged me for years and followed me through a couple of other studios until about 2006. I had an epiphany. The commercially available power filtration units: Furman, Monster, Tripplite, et al, were not doing the job. All of these units during the mid 2000's sounded not so good to my ears. I knew that there had to be a better way. When I dissected the commercial power filters I found that they all contained MOV's and had a bandwidth that BEGAN at 100KHz at best. I had found their profit center and was determined to do better.
My quest took me almost 4 years to develop a series of power filters that I would put my name on.
Our youngest daughter is a physician. She is good at her calling and also impressed upon me the following> "First, do no harm." This is how I develop my wares. Every aspect of my goods has to meet or exceed every parameter of quality AC. I will not build products that compress or color the audio quality that is going on inside the music. To me, it is ALL about the music. I think that any piece of audio gear, be it preamp, source, amplifier, cabling, loudspeaker or power device MUST remain true to the performance.
Music is one of God's great gifts to us. We should not screw with that gift. From a bird's sweet song to Count Basie to Brad Paisley to Megadeath, don't we want the truth?
We have to get the heart of the system beating strong and fully to provide the soul to the rest of the system, no matter what that might be.
TMSAISTI,
Dave