Every piece of equipment in your system starts with the AC power coming out of the wall. That power runs the circuits, charges the capacitors, and ultimately defines the limits of what your system can do. If the AC is dirty, noisy, or unstable, every component in the chain will suffer. If it's clean and well-regulated, everything performs better.
The problem is that wall power is rarely clean. It's contaminated with noise from dimmer switches, motors, computers, and every other electronic device in your home—and your neighbors' homes too.
But, there's an even bigger problem hiding in plain sight, and this is the elephant in the room that no passive power conditioner manufacturer wants to talk about.
Between your listening room and the utility transformer on the pole outside, there are hundreds of feet of copper wire. That wire has resistance, inductance, and capacitance—in other words, impedance. When your power amplifier starts drawing current to reproduce a bass note or a dynamic peak, it's not just pulling power from the wall outlet. It's pulling it through all that wire, and that wire pushes back. The voltage sags. The current delivery slows down. Your amplifier, your preamplifier, your sources are all trying to make music, but they are doing it through a long, resistive umbilical cord that can't keep up.
It gets worse. Everything else in your house—the refrigerator, the HVAC system, the computer in the next room—is pulling current through that same wire (and injecting noise). They're all fighting for the same limited resource, and they're all modulating the voltage at the outlet your system is plugged into. When the air conditioner kicks on, your amplifier feels it. When someone turns on a vacuum cleaner, your preamp feels it. The AC line isn't a stable voltage source—it's a contested, dynamic, high-impedance mess.
Passive power conditioners try to help by filtering out high-frequency noise, and some do a decent job of that. But filtering doesn't fix impedance. In fact, it makes it worse. A passive filter adds components—inductors, capacitors—that raise the impedance even further. You might get a quieter noise floor, but you lose dynamics and impact because the amplifier can't pull the current it needs when the music demands it.
You've traded one problem for another.
The only real solution is active regulation—regenerating the AC from scratch. That's why we developed power regenerators at PS Audio. A regenerator doesn't filter the incoming AC. It converts it to DC, then uses that DC to generate brand-new, low-impedance AC at exactly the right voltage and frequency. It's like moving next door to the power plant. Suddenly, your equipment isn't fighting hundreds of feet of wire and sharing power with the neighbor's washing machine. It's getting clean, stable, low-impedance power on demand.
The difference is immediate and obvious. The noise floor drops. The soundstage opens up. Dynamics improve because the amplifier can finally pull the current it needs without the AC line sagging under load. It's one of those upgrades that affects everything downstream, because power is where it all begins.
If you're serious about getting the most from your system, don't overlook the AC. It's not glamorous, but it's the hidden foundation that either supports or undermines everything else you've invested in.
