To use a power conditioner or not? The debate continues

Power conditioners filter incoming AC power and clean up sound from an audio system. However, some beg to differ.

There is an interesting and heated debate among audiophiles who own expensive audio equipment. Firstly, is a power conditioner needed to protect audio equipment? Secondly, does a power conditioner improve the sound?

What is a power conditioner? It is a device that filters out the power from the mains supply. Thus, the audio equipment connected to it will get cleaner power and without fluctuations etc.

Electricity supply is not always clean. It might be in the developed countries but in places like India, there tends to be disturbances in the power supply. Disturbances could mean line noise, spikes, among other things. While line noise may not always end up damaging equipment, the sound quality could be compromised due to a hiss or hum produced by it. Spikes (or sudden power surges), on the other hand, could easily damage expensive electronics. Considering that a lot of delicate components like digital signal processing chips are used in audio equipment, spikes are absolutely not desirable.

Even if we assume that the electricity supply is free from any disturbances, there could be other factors that soil it. For example, a household that has gadgets like refrigerator, food processor, mixer-grinder and such others could also induce disturbances because of the motors and moving parts they have. Several houses or streets are supplied electricity from a single line and a, say mixer-grinder, running in the neighbour’s house could introduce disturbances in the line.

Of course, there is an extreme set of audiophiles who have gone to the extent of having a dedicated power line to the house. This is the ideal thing to do but probably not for a country like India.

There are others who beg to differ and feel power conditioners may actually make the sound worse. The logic is why introduce a piece of equipment that the power has to go through. Some argue that the company that designed the equipment would have given some thought to filtering out power or protect equipment from power surges. It is something like this. Instead of connecting a speaker with wires, the use of Bluetooth speakers will add its own colour (this is called colouration) to the music signal. This is because with Bluetooth speakers or headphones, the music signal has to go through the transmitting module, come in through the receiving module and then get converted to sound. In comparison, using wired speakers or headphones means that the signal will just have to go through a piece of copper wire.

Moreover, some audiophiles believe that usage of a power conditioner does no good for the soundstage. Now, soundstage is the imaginary triangle formed by the listener and two speakers. With good audio equipment, one can visualise where a piano is, where a trumpet is, where the vocalist is and so on.

Starting from about Rs 8,000, power conditioners are not exactly cheap.

Even if one is not too bothered about things like soundstage, a good power conditioner might be insurance for expensive audio equipment or home recording studios.

As far as the debate about soundstage is concerned, it is not bound to die out anytime soon.