Power!

In early 1997 I had a puzzle that wouldn't leave me alone. My stereo sounded different depending on when I listened. Late at night, everything opened up — wider stage, more detail, cleaner and tighter bass. Afternoons, it tightened and lost its magic. Same components, same recordings, same room. The only variable was the time of day.

I eventually traced it to the power. During the day, every air conditioner, motor, computer, and lighting fixture in the neighborhood was dumping noise back onto the supply line and lopping off the peaks of the AC sine wave. At night, those loads dropped away and the sine wave regained its stately psoture. The power got cleaner, and so did the sound.

This pissed me off. We were building audio equipment with carefully engineered power supplies — doing everything right inside the box — and something completely outside our control was undermining it. A passive power conditioner helped attenuate some of the noise but at what cost? A loss of dynamcis was an unacceptable trade off for cleaning up the noise.

So I thought: what if we didn't filter the power? What if we regenerated it entirely — took the dirty AC from the wall, converted it to DC, then used a precision low-distortion amplifier to synthesize brand-new AC from scratch? A perfect 120-volt, 60Hz sine wave, immune to whatever was happening upstream.

That became the Power Plant. Essentially a high-powered amplifier playing one note — 60Hz — continuously. The engineering challenges were formidable: heat dissipation, efficiency, reliability under continuous full-load operation. We worked through all of it.

When we plugged a system into the first prototype, the difference wasn't subtle. The noise floor dropped. Images snapped into focus. Bass became tighter and more articulate.

The late-night magic was available at two in the afternoon.

That was over twenty-five years ago. The Power Plant has evolved through many generations since — more efficient, more sophisticated, higher output. But the core insight hasn't changed.

Give your equipment the cleanest possible power and it will reward you with the cleanest possible sound.

After all these years, I still find that satisfying in the most fundamental way.