Quote:
Originally Posted by
edorr 
I most certainly do. This may be a little bit off topic, but I found out a week ago that inserting a PS Audio Power plant premier (replacing a Furman Reference 20) did more for video quality than any video component upgrade I ever did (and this is just with clean power to my Marantz ud9004, the Pioneer Projector is powered in the ceiling and cannot be connected to the powerplant). Not sure what you are recommending your DX-5 customers (and if you have tried this in the labs yourself and came tothe same conclusion), but if you customers are going to spend 10K on a SOTA universal, i would say getting the PPP is mandatory to get the most out of it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as if you have never owned an Ayre video disc player. Remember, that every single electronic circuit in the world, digital or analog, is simply a modulated power supply. Then it becomes immediately obvious that the quality of the power supply is critical to the performance of the circuit, both digital and analog, both audio and video.
With a power regenerator you are sending somewhat cleaner power to your components. (I say "somewhat" because there is a big logical fallacy concerning the operation of these units. They work more or less like a big audio power amplifier. But if that could provide complete isolation, then your power amp would
already have complete isolation! And so would all of your other equipment with linear power supplies...) But if you are sending somewhat cleaner power to a piece of video equipment with a switching power supply that just generates more noise, the performance gains will be limited.
A better approach is to do what we do in our video disc players -- get rid of the switching power supplies altogether and replace them with linear power supplies that have AC line filters and ultra-low noise voltage regulators. And then we extend that even further by isolating the audio and video systems completely.
Back to your question about a power regenerator. Will that improve the performance of the DX-5 even further? Possibly, but I don't know. We've
listened to a fair number of filters and regenerators over the years. In an audio system, all the ones that we listened to created trade-offs. Some things would get better, while other things would get worse.
The only power filter I have ever heard that only does good things to the sound is our L-5xe. It's a fairly straight-forward affair, with an IEC inlet and 4 AC outlets (available in US, Schuko, and UK styles). Each outlet is a single outlet, not a duplex. This allows us to individually filter the ground of each outlet. I don't know of any other AC power filters that take this step. (See scotsol was right!)
Back to video. Will the same things apply? Probably, but I can't say for certain. In audio there is an odd phenomenon that doesn't make much sense but is true. A power conditioner will have the same sonic effect no matter what you plug it into to. In other words, if it makes your power amp sound sweeter with a deeper soundstage, when you plug your turntable power supply in it will also sound sweeter with a deeper soundstage. So my bet would be that the best sounding power line filter would also be the best
looking one in a video system.
One last piece of advice. If you get a power line conditioner, live with it for three weeks and then remove it from the system. After three weeks you will be used to all the things it does. When you then remove it, it will be very clear how it changes the sound (or look) of your system. In most cases you will end up leaving it out. All of the spectacular "wow" things that it did when you first plugged it in will be overwhelmed by all of the disappointing "yech" things that it also does, but you didn't notice at first.
