Power Conditioners Go Green

A few years ago PS Audio and Richard Gray helped energize the market for power conditioning products. Both seemed to offer real, measurable improvements in sound and video quality. In a way they started a race which continues to this day.

While the Richard Grey appoach has always been inherently "green", the PS Audio approach certainly was not. By using class A/B amplifiers, they would burn a lot of electricity and fossil fuels just by being turned on and they were every expensive per watt. On the other hand, the Power Plants could guarantee the quality of the output signal, something RG's approach, being in parallel with your devices, could not do.

Because of this, when ExactPower showed up with a radical, green approach to generating perfectly clean AC power, I thought surely the Power Plants would have serious competition. By using a buck/boost transformer in the path of the AC, they could blow the Power Plants out of the water in terms of wattage, with efficiency's over 90%, compared to the 50% or so efficient Power Plants.

To my surprise, Exact Power doesn't seem to have made many inroads. They list one dealer and seem to want to do most of their business over the net. I have no idea how many units they sell a year.

In the mean time, PS Audio has come up with a much more efficient design. They aren't giving out many details on how they are doing it, but it sounds a lot like they are borrowing some ideas from Bob Carver's amplifiers. Carver amplifiers would use power supplies with multiple, fixed rails. A switch before the output stage would select one rail or the other based on the incoming waveform, and the output amplifier would be responsible for cushioning these fixed-step changes as well as generating the final output to the speakers.

My point to all of this rambling is just that I'm glad to see that more high-tech approaches to power conditioning are going beyond the brute-force approach and using technology which is not only better sounding, but better for the environment and for the consumer's pocket books as well.

Happy Listening!