I appreciate this guys honesty and educating his audience on what they're actually buying

I think Paul does a fairly decent job of explaining here. At least he states that it is not as important as many think, but can be important depending on situation. Also, one doesn't need to spend $10k on a PS Audio power unit or any power unit in that range. On the flip side I have never seen power units at Walmart and would not purchase anything from there anyway. I never needed anything like a power conditioner until I moved into this one place that had sketchy power. I went and got a Panamax power conditioner/protector (expensive to me, but not nearly as much as a PS Audio power unit), but it solved a list of problems and saved my gear a couple of times and it is still doing it's job. If one doesn't have measurable sketchy power in their place, then it is not likely things like power conditioners are needed. Always a good idea to have a good surge protector though.

I'm still trying to figure out how the cord in the thumbnail with 3 prongs is going to fit into that wall socket

Thanks for the explanation on lowering the impedance, as it impacts the sound. Also the rolling off of the sine wave. These two items explain why I got better sound when I replaced my cheap .75 wall socket for an Audiophile Grade (better than Hospital Grade) wall socket. And when I included a linear filter on the power line. That linear filter actively keeps the impedance low at .05 Ohms. The socket, creates far better conductivity to the live power wires in the house. As it turns out, those cheap Home-Depot special power outlets have no copper behind them and the plugs themselves are loose and do not make cold welds against the power plug. Hospital Grade does have some copper behind it, for better and more reliable conductivity and has tighter plugs to make a cold weld against your Positive/Negative/Ground connector.

Paul, we need more videos about your products. Love your videos, thanks !

This is good information as to why. never heard it explained this way before. Great job!

I once had a situation where l had a power surge that took out a VCR. The power company did a chart on my line for 3 days and found spikes. They discovered over the years that 5 houses were on the same transformer, this by itself back in the early day wasn't to bad but home owners added to their homes. New AC pools new kitchens etc. But didn't tell the power co. This caused overloading. Finally l recieved the power surge and spike. The remedy Give me my own 25kva transformer. Suddenly Clean voltage amperage and more! No more problems and great audio/video! Yippie!

That's what your amps transformer does, it lowers the impedance to a specific setting in Ohms of power coming into the amp. You don't need a high-end clean power component in most major cities when one has a good transformer built into your amp. Every high- end audio company will list the transformers filtered amp impedance in terms of THD (Total Harmonic Distortion). What one really needs is a high quality surge protector. Save your money and invest in four of the most important products of any high- end system. 1) A great recorded musical source 2) A well built amp with a large high quality transformer. 3) A high-quality surge protector. 4) High quality efficient speakers that match the Ohm setting of amp. Then add roughly 20% of total cost of system on cables. Look into companies like Acoustic Zen, and AudioQuest for cables, just my opinion.

I bleach my power cable. Nice and clean.

There's really simple phenomenons regarding power supply: noise (which is typically rejected by the transformer itself or the input common mode filter or PFC of SMPS), having enough power reserve in the bulk capacitors for transient power requirements of the amplifier and bus pumping. If an amplifier runs out of power, distortion is pretty bad, so there's no magic here.

Hi Paul It would be nice if you talked about Transmissionlines. Not many know them and even less how they work.

Woah! What a great vid thanks Paul!

I'm late on this tutorial. Great topic and my brother (In the 70's Nippon engineer) was passionate about this. He built for me, a solution for the trash that the 'power' companies sell us ( eh showed me the proof). He said Audio/amps/refrigerators etc., are engineered for a correct fuel/power. You are correct on this, I've noticed most audio businesses do not push these benefits. Today my entire home has this benefit. (My 74 Sansui is still pushing it. NO repairs) Thanks brother...

some psychoacoustic + placebo effect + woo woo is the highend audio world. Sad but true.

I throw my electricity in the laundry wash every day. Shockingly clean as a whistle every time.

Very informative. With a transformer-rectifier-capacitor supply the impedance of the mains really comes into play when the diodes conduct on the peaks to keep the capacitors charged. So you listen to a combination of mains (inc transformer) and capacitor impedance and rectification quality. I have used transformer-rectifier-choke-capacitor supplies to good effect to eliminate the short conduction spikes. I guess without using synchronous rectification which will inevitably demand a move to switch mode supplies, this interaction with the mains will always remain. Switchmode technology has made big advances and one could always use decent amount of capacitors after the SMPS. It is already used succesfully in your power regenerator.

I have owned a P10 since 2016 - very happy with it - powers a pair of 300 watt tube monoblocks., Listened to it with the Australian distributor, who describes music played through it as "sounding more organic" compared to a voltage correction device (Thor PS-10) which didn't condition the power amplifiers.

Interesting bit on impedance. I run a tube amp connected to a separate tube preamp and tube dac...and I'm quite happy with all my distortion.

*I have a couple of Mr Tice's power blocks, makes a big difference - previous home I had added an isolation transformer on a sub-panel with 12ga wiring to the outlets all together made a HUGE difference*

Paul - where do you stand on the impact of the new audioquest Niagara series of power conditioners that is cleaning up existing power vs using a ps audio p15 or p20

I am getting random popping coming from my def tech 6080 towers even with everything turned off but the towers plugged in the wall. could the built-in amps have issues? bought in 2009.

These units are basically a double conversion topology UPS unit missing the battery backup. Yes they do re-generate clean low distortion AC to spite noisy or distorted input AC power. The question is if typical residential AC power is so bad that these units can make improvements in the reproduced audio. In most cases I don't think so. While some areas of the country do have bad power, the average home is more than good enough for fine audio reproduction. 3% to even 10% distortion on the incoming AC waveform will not compromise any competently designed linear or switch mode power supply, especially a switch mode power supply. The AC is rectified, what difference does some distortion make provided it does not change the RMS value significantly? Distortion on the input AC does not translate to amplifier output distortion. Now that is not being claimed directly but I think it's being assumed by non-technical customers. Another thing to keep in mind here, the Power Plant is still plugged into the so called dirty AC power. While I do believe it does produce a low impedance output, let's ask for how long? The PS Power plant can maintain this low output impedance only as long as it's internal power supply reserves hold up. Now does it hold up long enough to ride through average music transients? We don't know but that can certainly be tested. I would be interesting to run some tests comparing the amplifier DC rails against an audio clip on a quad trace storage scope with and without the PS Power Plant. I expect there will be some difference but then we have to quantify that to the performance of the amplifier circuit.

Hamsters make great pets...

Well said Paul.👍

This is such a difficult thing to convey, a never-ending topic. Like the quality of the rest of the connections.

Fun story on this subject. One computer installation I saw in an industrial location that was experiencing extremely bad mains power. So they used a crazy device that is both simple and muscular. So, three parts of it. First a motor, and a big one. Lets say something like a motor that runs a pump for a swimming pool. Second a generator. You turn the shaft on the generator at 60rpm and it generates 115vac. It’s gonna be big generator. Connect the motor to the generator with a shaft. OK so far? Power up the motor and the generator generates your now isolated 115vac @ 60hz. Ok so far? Now mount a balanced 200lb flywheel on the shaft that connects the motor to the generator. So there you have it, isolated clean power. Make sure you house this monster in a cabinet that none of your kids can get into.

How do you properly size one for your system?

I am hearing from some audiophiles that by using power conditioners, you are loosing dynamics from your system. Which is why I ditched mine for the wall plug.

PS Audio...Power-conditioner Sales Audio...lol

what about if i want to play directly from dc power (huge pack of batteries) on my hi end system ?

7:41 Kind of rhetorical question, does it matters if the AC power going into the power regulator comes from the golden 'audio grade' power cable that costs $600 or regular power cable that costs $10?

Snake oil. Spend the extra money on a better pair of speakers or power amp or both. No power conditioner/regenerator can help a power amp with lousy power supply circuits inside the amp. If it is your house, pull a heavy cable from the breaker box to just power the system, that will do a lot more good and a whole lot cheaper.

Over the years, I experimented with an array of power conditioners, filters, ups/battery backups, surge protectors, isolation transformers, etc. One problem that none of the power conditioning units I tried could fix was mechanical noise from the power transformers in all of my audio gear. These noises came and went. (My wife had a hairdryer that was a huge cause of this problem.) I finally tried a PS Audio Humbuster. Poof! The noises were gone, never to return.

great safari shorts dude

I always doubted this until I heard a DAC sound better with external power supply. Suddenly, as a novice audiophile, I can see why clean power makes a difference.

I bought a $60.00 power conditioner to use with the PS. Sprout and B&W 602's. And WOW!!!! I love my Sprout even more. I can't afford the expensive gear gut I hear the difference already. It's not my imagination , it's real.

The amplifier and its power supply are closed loop systems with large overheads when properly designed. I don't see how anything further down the line makes much difference, although optical input or attention to the preamp environment will reduce conducted power line noise.

Perhaps capacitors provide a buffer to absorb peaks in demand from the Amp?

Amazing device.

what about all the noise behind the outlet and all back to the electrical box and outside power lines?

I heard someone say you can get bad power if you use a surge suppressor strip. And suggested to plug it directly into the wall. But here in Florida would be disaster with all the storms.

I'm no expert on the subject but this really makes little sense to me. I highly doubt that in a blind test one would ear the difference when using regular power and "clean power". I bet that the placebo effect and the sense of ownership of very expensive gear will make one think that the sound is better. If by any means a piece of equipment "messes" with the signal I would say it would be for the worse and not for the better.

Paul, I want to thank you for the information on "clean power." You were talking about how these AC Conditioning devices effect the higher frequencies. I've always had my amp (Parasound A51) connected to my $3000 AC conditioner (not from PS Audio), assuming the sound was better, and never questioned it again. But watching your video, I thought, "I'm going to plug the amp directly into the wall without the AC Conditioning." I'm here to say, "it sounds better!" Much better. Ugh ($3000?). The higher frequencies are where i notice the most difference, more pronounced, more extended, and everything seems more airy and refined. I was surprised. What have I been doing all this time?

Seeing as every amplifier on the market runs on DC internally and has a fairly decent filtering circuit after rectification (filter caps, coil chokes/inductors, hell even internodal resistors), I posit that the design of the power supply is the important factor here - NOT the AC mains itself. As long as the AC is reasonably low noise, which it almost always is unless you have something else on that circuit misbehaving (cheap crappy computer power supplies, for example, often can throw tons of noise back into the mains lines), it doesn't matter. As far as voltage sag - that's not a problem, unless you have a wildly under-spec power supply, or for some inexplicable reason you're using vacuum tube rectifiers.

Paul you comments actually made a lot of sense, but a couple of questions How do you lower the impedance on the output relative to whats going in?, since Pin must equal power out?; is it the case you store large amounts of energy in order to do this for short amounts of time?, will the output from your inverter stage be out of phase with the incoming mains to further improve as per the points you mentioned?. Glad I watched this, changed my opinion.

Does anyone know how to stop the clicks coming through my guitar signal?

Thank you Paul. U saved me about 10k. 👍💪👊

I have a tube guitar amp, the question is if i am better with just a extension of 230V with surge protection on my 16A eletricity socket on the wall or a APC UPS with 1400VA and 700w 230V with a pseudo sinewave? Or both? The tube amp only have 25w, and consumes 100/115w in full power. I will connect a Line6 HX Stomp and a CryBaby wah pedals in the FX Loop circuit in the amp. I live on Europe, Portugal to be precise. My house have 30+ years, should i check my circuit breaker for better ground? I have a circuit breaker that the only thing it controls is the suply of energy to that 16A eletricity socket. In the future i will buy a Furman but meanwhile i just want to know what is the best choise in my case. Thanks in advance. I know 0 about eletricity. I will loose dynamics with the UPS? More than with just the extension?

Hi, We use a cheap generator to power our music gear. Guitar amps, P.A etc. Could the power it produces be damaging our equipment? Do we need to put a power conditioner or surge protector or something between the generator and our gear?

At my old home there were power lines and equipment would get electrical damage constantly. The infrastructure looked dated and repairs were only made during catastrophic failures. After moving to a newer neighborhood with underground utilities I haven't had an issue. I use power conditioning on my main equipment now regardless. Some places have better power than others. If there's all kinds of noise in the lines, your asking for trouble.

I am a recording engineer with a very keen ear for frequencies, I can hear difference when mixing between .1 db and 0.2 db, to me it's possible to hear that, so I am not going to say I am like the rest of people. BUT I am not chasing perfection of sound signal, but recently I have encountered something that I cannot forego, I started having constant clipping sound in my speakers. I thought it was the amount of buffer from my recording equipment, even when listening to KZfaq or playing games. Then I started getting clicks and pops when AC unit came on much more severely, and I realized that clean power is an issue for me. I recently bought Voltage Regulator from Furman and will do further testing. I understand some chase some glorious "Holy Grail" of sound like Detective Monk, and usually never find it. Me on the other hand, I try to have an easy listening experience without clicks, pops, or buzzing in my speakers, that gets really painful when you are tired or pissed off about life, and you got this gnat in your ear going BZZZZ *CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK* Some don't even hear it, so why would it bother them?

yup eddie van halen used a variac to get his sound from his guitar amps. voltage systems are used all the time for guitar amps at shows. so do recording studios

Paul you are great salesman .....

Interesting as always, I don't know why I haven't subscribed before 🤔

Sir, what if we use switch mode power supply to an amplifier? I've seen lot of home audio system manufacturers like sony, jbl and Harman kardon systems use much better smps units nowadays

Well obviously you should pick regulated power over clean power.

I disagree. After hearing the Isotek Aquarius in Oslo HiFi Center on some KEF floor standing speakers and a Rotel integrated amplifier i could really hear a significant difference. Especially in the bass area. I switched back and forth between ordinary cables and Isotek's own power cables and the Aquarius. The result was the same every time. Better sound without losning any dynamics. My brother was there also and he just nodded his head and said the same.

Well, that was a hard one!..

Well, I guess that by using a 40kW on-line UPS for my house I probably get a rather low line impedance. Probably not as good as using such an UPS or a power regenerator just for the audio stuff, but better than what's coming from the city.

Any resident noise on the line, is properly filtered out at the power supply of your components .

Hi Paul, I appreciate your wise advices and I find your way to tell very affordable to all of us. After this brief introduction I want to say something. What I'm going to write along these lines don't pretend to be taken seriously because even I or me, sorry for my grammar althought it's not the subject of the matter here, well, the truth is that after 30 years of being actively, read:expending money, I'm not sure of anything related to the truth of the hi-end as I imagined when I was a novice full of illusion but empty of currency. During those years, I could detect if I had cleaned the contacts or not, if my toslink fiver optic had been cleaned with alcohol or gel to wash dishes, I compulsively changed the polarity of the power plug and noticed differences but, Which one was better? It depended, even from my mood... I could go on and on and I'm so sure this same thing happens to a lot of audiophiliacs, sorry Steve Guttenberg for borrow...ing? Your catchy adjective ha ja ha, when one begin to behave like this, better check it out with a pro or stay away from some time of your beloved equipment, after a while, you will again start to enjoy the sound of your rig and the minute differences once were amazing, now are meaningless. The real character of the sound system won't change by some 'trivial' actions one could try so if the sound in not to your likes, give it to a friend, he will be eternally grateful without ever suspicing you gave the leftovers 😂...etc...etc.

Clean power is important for the business of PS Audio.

Technics did there own Battery amp if any one remembers it , when they ruind the look of everything

The idea that clean power makes an amplifier lose dynamics is just hilarious... 🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😂

The transformers don't make the sound signal coming at the amplifiers output, the amplifier modules do that work... The power supply reservoir capacitors have the greatest role to play by smoothing out voltage variations and noise from the power supply... Voltage variations in the power supply are usually induced by the amplifier itself as it tries to draw highly complex currents from the power supply. (Music is not a simple sine tone but a VERY COMPLEX combination of them). This is the main reason I prefer having huge capacitance values in the power supply, usually by combining many smaller caps rather than 2 humongous cans. I believe what clean power does is eliminate EMI that usually finds it's way to the amplifier output (clicks, pops and buzzing and sometimes hissing noises).

masive difference can be heard using a serious headphone. What I miss in this video is turning around the plug which is also a huge difference. Maybe this is because in the US there is only one way to connect the plug in the wall outlet? In Europe you can put in the plug two ways. One way the plus is on the plus the other way around it is not which results in minor results. Now as I come to think of it if you use the power device current is converted into DC so probably then there is no difference anymore

May be a dumb question: why not use a battery based generator like ecoflow? I am not listening to music all day, at least not at that level. So I am ok with the batteries only lasting a few hours. How good needs the inverter in such a solution to be to get „clean“ power? i still have the influence between the different music components. Is earthing a problem?

And maybe,, Whoa !

I guess most people doubt this because they dont notice it and it really depends on how clean the power is that your using. I think a power supply on DAC makes sense - also optical digital audio (toslink) seems better than USB. Do I notice it? - I dont think so! Will I buy a good power strip with build in surge protection and power conditioner? -Yes! I think so. Its fundamental!?

I strongly agree with Paul, power plants are awesome! I invented a device that is used at the input and output of any Power conditioner, patent pending... This one is a game changer, no snake oil... "Device adds energy / synergy characteristics to electronic audio and video devices, which result in a richer sound, with less noise and improved dynamics & timbre. In regards to video, there is an improvement with contrast levels and richer color enhancements, and overall cleaner images." Stay tuned fellow audiophiles... Currently searching for a company to license from me, once this hits the shelves, it will cause controversy among the audiophile community. All cable manufactures will hate me, we're talking about a solid 10-20% quality improvement, not psychoacoustics...

Wouldn't the ideal situation be that all components do the cleaning voodoo before feeding power to the audio circuits in the machine,?

Epic burp at 1:26. Paul rules.

in car audio there is a belief that the cleaner the power going in (as in as little voltage drop as possible...) the cleaner the power going out. to a degree it kind of depends on the audio that youre running. lol home audio may not be as bothered by "dirty" power as much as some others. but i do know that dirty power can in some cases cause audio failures. 🙄 having an amp fail is never fun. ive had a couple fail. one was because of very crap power source.

Clean Power is not that important as long the Power Supply inside your equipment have a good design and a good filtering and ripple clean up. You have to notice that digital equipment also creates noise by itself The individual transistors inside the chips create noise every time then turn on and off. The end product your amplifier needs is DC and as long your DC is constant and voltage is maintain steady and ripple free I think you are home. The end game in an amplifier circuit is the DC from it's own PS.

I no longer worry about clean power supply to my system ever since capturing a Pikachu who does the excellent job as long as I feed him well and go out for a regular walk :D

1. low Impedence makes difference. 2. make sine wave cleaner. (resistance usually cuases flat top of sine wave)

The impedance of an audio power supply is largely defined by the storage capacitance. Large capacitor banks have high peak currents and large transformers have a better regulation factor and is less likely to sarurate. As the caps are charged with a 100Hz waveform, if the current drawn is inbetween the recharge timespan, the capacitors are directly affecting the sound. Having a choke input power supply works amazingly well it utilizes the full waveform. Powering sensitive gain stages from a regulated and fixed over audio band impedance supply, most of the issues of varying supply voltages and mains impedances can be overcome. In my point of view having an amplifer supplying another is a very costly, clumsy and inefficient means of improving a system. If we could raise the 50Hz to say 60Hz or maybe say 75Hz then yes then it makes sense to have a regenerator. This will allow more frequent but smaller sized charging pulses. Because the charging pulses are smaller, the noise generated by the rectifer diodes should also be less. The rippple on the capacitors will be smaller and that will definitely result in a more sturdy and clean supply.

The actual voltage and currents that drive the devices come finally out of a big cap? Wouldn't be easy to measure the effect? Everything's to be there at Paul's place, why not look and measure?

Better ''clean'' than ''dirty''... Laconic view

Dual, standard car size, lead acid batteries in stereo woofer set.

Reading the comments, prompts me to say,, oh dear !!

Parallel filters are far superior to inline filters with coils. You do not lose dynamics.

as important as your marketing, that power regenerator probably adds more noise than it helps; there are a few theories? how about you measure it and show it to us

💪

clean power can is important as noise could cause malfunctions like for example could interfere with the stereo detection circuitry for the fm tuner causing the indicator to come on falsely (this is a problem on tv when they are broadcasting a sports event the crowd noise can falsely trigger the sap channel partially muting the rest of the signal. it can also cause for example the stereo to turn off if the power button is one of them soft switches that triggers a transistorized latching system. there is one place you can hear the difference as today's digital electric utility meters phoning home to report the power usage there is a interference that shows up as a square wave buzzing noise you can see the interference as flickering of the cheap led lights that are simply a resistor capacitor dropper and a diode to convert to dc and no filtering capacitor.

would love to see a video on the importance ( is any ) of a dedicated circuit for amps and such

I bought a power conditioner once, over a decade ago. It made ZERO difference, to audio, to video. I returned it for a full refund.

Power regeneration is the only way to go. I wish I could afford a P15

Wouldn't not having "clean" power argument due to the reasons here also kind of collapse any argument saying that power cords make a difference? I am all for better interconnects but was always on the fence with expensive power cords.

I recently put two AC filters in series, daysy chained, and believed or not, the improvement was staggering, really hi-end, and all for less than 100 euros. I'm not saying that one can do this and expect a miracle but if all the parameters are being improved, acoustics, stands and rack included, we can reach places never dreamed possible within a constrained budget. After tuning one's equipment, then, can we forget about formats, sources and meaningless disquisitions and be carried away by the music.

Clean power only matters to low voltage. Adequate capacitors and regulators on the primary and secondary on a power supply as well as metal covers to filter noise is good enough. Also, using LEDs with decoupling is very important as well. Diodes by themselves are very noisy, just drive by a traffic light with LEDs and listen to an am radio station. The buzz is obvious

Another test I would like to see. As these Power Plants have a built in scope, I would like to compare the internal scope to an external analog scope monitoring both the incoming and re-generated AC line. So if the internal scope shows a crappy sine wave on raw AC, I want to see the same on the analog scope. Likewise if the output shows a perfect sinewave, I want to see that on the analog scope as well. You fellow EE's here can see where I am going with this.That internal display is a raster scanned LCD, not a true scope. Are those images accurate realtime samples of the AC or are they just static GIF or PNG images? And if truly sampled, what kind of weighting is being applied. Of course a lab grade digital scope is also acceptable, just needs to be a "real" scope and not some PC sound card solution.

Hi Paul. Since I am retired and on a fixed income (and have a modest, but adequate system), I can't afford expensive power conditioners. However, I noticed a big improvement after I added one of your "Noise Harvesters".

It's obvious that clean power will make a difference, just not a big one, everyone in the comments needs to chill out and stop screaming about snake oil, this is real science but it's not gonna make a blind bit of difference to your 1990's boombox is it?

Using a good audiograde power conditioner has improved my system about 20% It is like upgrading a major component. I can never go back.

And,, wow.

I would so love to own that power plant but don't got 10,000 to buy one lol but i got a furman conditioner doesn't do as well but helps

If the power supply in an electronic product designed to operate from a domestic mains supply needs another piece of kit to function properly in the presence of some noise, the power supply is not fit for purpose. Normal levels of noise a user could reasonably expect to see on the mains should be rejected by the PSU's input filters without difficulty. There is a valid argument for protecting equipment against transient surges and brown-outs and how much somebody wants to spend to achieve that is up to them.

As someone who is experimenting with tube amp design, raising the impedance of the power transformer DOES make a difference

Let's first create a problem so that we can then be seen to be creating a solution to the initial problem that need not be a problem at all then everyone will think we're so clever and believe everything we tell them.