Why is good power so fundamental to the overall performance of today’s audio/video systems?
When it comes to the Alternating Current (AC) used in today’s homes, we’re relying on a century-old technology created for incandescent lights and electric motors — technology that was certainly never meant to power the sophisticated analog and digital circuits used in premium audio/video systems.
In fact, the mammoth increase in airborne and AC-line-transmitted radio signals, combined with overtaxed utility lines and the ever-increasing demands from high-definition audio/video components, has rendered our utilities’ AC power an antiquated technology.
To properly accommodate the promise of today’s ever-increasing bandwidth and dynamic range, we must achieve extraordinarily low noise across a wide range of frequencies.
Further, today’s power amplifiers are being taxed for instantaneous peak-current demand, even when they’re driven at modest volumes. Although audio software has benefitted from a substantial increase in dynamics and bass content, the loudspeakers we use to reproduce that content are no more efficient than they were two to four decades ago. This places great demands on an amplifier’s power supply as well as its source AC power.
When it comes to the Alternating Current (AC) used in today’s homes, we’re relying on antiquated technology. Our high-performance audio/video systems need and deserve better.
Better Alternating Current
Our systems’ sensitive components need better alternating current, plain and simple.
Through differential sample tests and spectrum analysis, it can be proven that up to a third of a high-resolution (low-level) audio signal can be lost, masked, or highly distorted by the vast levels of noise riding along the AC power lines that feed our components. This noise couples into the signal circuitry as current noise and through AC ground, permanently distorting and/or masking the source signal.
Once the audio/video signal is gone, it’s gone forever. For an in-depth exploration on these topics, download "Power Demystified."
For AudioQuest, honoring the source is never a matter of simply using premium “audiophile-grade parts” or relying on a proprietary technology. We realize that true audio/video optimization is never a matter of any one secret or exotic circuit. When it comes to noise dissipation for AC power, many approaches can yield meaningful results. However, they may also impart ringing, current compression, and non-linear distortions that are worse than the disease.
AudioQuest power conditioners use the widest bandwidth-linearized noise-dissipation circuits in their class, ensuring superior top-to-bottom resolution free from the octave-to-octave masking effects and ringing artifacts common to other devices.
The unique passive/active Transient Power Correction circuit used in AudioQuest power conditioners (beginning with PowerQuest 707) features an instantaneous current reservoir, specifically designed for modern current-starved power amplifiers. While most AC power products incorporating “high-current outlets” merely minimize current compression, AudioQuest power conditioners work to correct it.
Further, consistency — linearity — is the principal criterion for all AudioQuest AC power products and key to their efficacy. It’s not enough to reduce AC line noise and its associated distortions at just one octave, leaving vulnerable the adjacent octaves and octave partials to noise, resonant peaking, or insufficient noise reduction. AudioQuest power conditioners use the widest bandwidth-linearized noise-dissipation circuits in their class, ensuring superior top-to-bottom resolution free from the octave-to-octave masking effects and ringing artifacts common to other devices.
AudioQuest Noise-Dissipation Systems
AudioQuest power conditioners represent over 25 years of exhaustive research and proven AC power products designed for audiophiles, broadcast engineers, and professional audio applications.
We welcome you to experience AudioQuest power conditioners — equip them with one of our Direction-Controlled AC power cables to create a complete Noise-Dissipation System — and hear firsthand the remarkable results of highly optimized power management.
—Garth Powell, Senior Director of Engineering, AudioQuest
