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Hmm, seems Bryston Audio doesn’t provide full support for your position.
In other words, you have no idea.
Perhaps someone does and will share their thoughts.
The importance of clean power has been known for a long time, but what interests me from this Bryston product and the increasing number of such products now available, is that they tend to address the same issues with similar solutions. It’s really no mystery, only some of the pricing is a mystery.
My unit, which has 6 sockets and comes with 2m of the manufacturer’s best cable, cost me $1,200. @Rob_W and his $10,000 interconnect is not a world I inhabit. I’m more into $100 or $10, my last one was $0.
Just noticed this thread, so just refer to the OP…
I think being in the highest league (in several aspects) is not the approach of PSA (reflected also in the price), it’s rather having the best price/sound performance ratio in a very high league, which they achieve and there they often reach or even surpass some of the highest price league products.
From my subjective perception over the years, the only critical side is reliability, durability, sensitiveness and/or medium term bugginess of several product and subsection categories. I remember disc drives, jr. DAC, AB pre and power amps, bridges, power plants and phono pre as noticeable compared to what I’d prefer. It seems to me the reason is not rarely but not always control SW.
It’s just subjective and a perception from here and compared to my own experience with other products, I’m sure many would contradict. Living in Boulder it wouldn’t be critical for me, overseas, especially with heavy products, yes.
You might find this interesting:
I have really enjoyed the poster’s work over the years.
Don’t know if he is still active.
Cheers
Apparently Bryston has made few changes. Maybe they saw all the money to be made selling power conditioners. Here is an excerpt from an earlier power amplifier owners manual:
All Bryston amplifiers contain high-quality, dedicated circuitry in the power supplies to reject RF, line spikes and other power-line problems. Bryston power amplifiers do not require specialized power line conditioners. Plug the amplifier directly into its own wall socket.
Here is a revision to their owners manual I just pulled off their site for one of their stereo/mono power amplifiers:
Bryston urges caution in choosing a power
conditioner for your audio/video system. Large
power amplifiers can draw very substantial current
from the wall plug, and many so-called power
conditioners can in fact hinder the supply of current
by inserting resistances in series with the line cord.
However, there are now power conditioners that
can reduce or eliminate RF and ‘hash’ from the AC
supply and may actually improve current delivery
to your system. This type of power conditioner
(exemplified by Bryston BIT products) uses the
energy storage in a large toroidal transformer to
provide high instantaneous power and reduce
the substantial AC output resistance of the wall
socket and house wiring. This resistance can be in
the range of 0.5 to 1 Ohm and is typically reduced
to only a few milliohms by the power conditioner.
That in turn considerably reduces voltage drop in
the power line on high current surges and quite
substantially increases the stability of the power line
improving audio (and video) focus, precision and
clarity
To the best of my memory, I have even come across Paul clarifying that amplifiers should not be plugged into power conditioners. Please don’t ask me to go looking for that
Incidentally, power is not stored in transformers as Bryston mentions above in their owner’s manual
No $10,000 dollar interconnects for me That was only a part of my illustration
No Elk, you said that, not me. I know what it is doing and my definition of ‘works’ will be different than Paul’s or anyone that has a claim that it actually does anything.
If you had followed my links in this thread, Paul chimes in one one of them and goes into detail how this allegedly works.
If they decided to make conditioners for profit, they did a bad job as they are amongst their cheapest products. The main Bryston dealer here, located 2 miles from their European headquarters, doesn’t even sell them.
Bryston do make, and it is sold here, a dedicated quality DC supply for several of their pre-amps and phono amps, obviously because they are the most sensitive devices to mains noise.
The dedicated high quality external DC supply approach to clean power has been the basis of Naim, who have been a leading brand in Europe since 1975. They don’t go the USA Mr Muscles approach, they make relatively lower average power amps with very high peak power when needed.
You only mentioned your muscle amps, which many people do plug into the wall. There’s a lot more to audio than a couple of monoblocks.
Correct, I only mentioned muscle amps but on that same note, I do not recall the Noise Harvester limiting itself to any particular components so it looked like fair game to me.
Excellent.
Please share the specifics. How does it actually function? What does the circuit do?
It takes noise and turns it into light does not answer the question. How exactly does it do this?
Are you having a bad hair day Elk?
Here is the link again that I posted earlier. In the thread, Paul chimes in and explains how it works.
The owner’s manual for my McIntosh power amplifier says to plug it “into a dedicated AC output with a 15 ampere or higher current capacity”
FWIW, here was James Tanner’s response to a customer’s question about plugging their amp into the BIT20. (He moderates the Bryston owner forum over at Audiocircle.com.) One could cast a cynical eye on the response and chalk it up to commercial avarice. It may also be possible that Mr. Tanner eventually recognized that the question whether to use or not to use such devices doesn’t always have the same answer. I have used at least six or seven power conditioning or power regenerating devices and their efficacy in my experience varies depending on associated components and what issue one is addressing. I have at present DeHaviiland UltraVerve, PS Audio BHK, ModWright LS36.5, and Luxman c-700u preamps and all of them vary in the degree to which they are affected when plugged into conditioners or regenerators. In one case, the effect is near transformational, in other cases, less so to not much at all.
Paul posts once in that thread and addresses viewing a waveform with a scope and describes a a triac.
So, again, I ask - what exactly does a Noise Harvester do and how does it do it?
I have never understood the position “I know the answer to your question but I am not going to tell you and will continue playing hide the ball.”
If you know, please share. If you do not, just tell us you don’t.
That link is 16 years old!
I probably did things 16 years ago I’d rather not be reminded about. Is your past unblemished? Did you ever wear flared jeans?
Forgive and forget, that’s what I say.
That’s dated May 2019. I did not know Bryston power conditioners had been on the market that long.
My Aurender music server is plugged into a pure sine wave UPS, otherwise everything is bareback into the wall. My Aurender is the only component that does not turn off with the simple push of a button on my remote.
Speco2007 explains it in the link I provided. This is the way he described it (below). I don’t think I could add anything other than to say, for such a controversial product accused of being ‘snake oil’ by so many, PSA might remove the product from their lineup and enhance their credibility.
"There is a capacitor and the primary (input) of a transformer in series across the AC line. This forms a high pass filter that is tuned to about 8kHz.
The secondary of the transformer (the output)is send through a diode bridge to convert it to DC. Then, using some tricky electronics, we take that DC and charge a capacitor with the energy that’s harvested from the line (where the unit got its name). When the capacitor is full, we dump the energy into the LED.
Thus, the only power used to blink the light is harvested from noise on the AC line that is above 8kHz. There are no batteries or tricks going on. It is a straightforward engineering design when the light blinks, it is powered by noise.
The laws of nature require us to understand that if we take energy from one source and expend it somewhere else, irregardless of how (heat, light, motion), then the energy is lower at the source because it has been moved to where it was directed, to make light, heat or motion."