When I asked folks to tell me what bit of PS Audio history they'd like to have me tell the story of, one of the most popular was that of how the PowerPlant power regenerator came into being.
In 1997, after seven years together, Arnie Nudell and I split up to go our separate ways. Genesis Technologies was struggling and so too were Arnie and I. Let's just say we were two Type-A bulls locking horns too many times.
It had all started back in 1990 when I had sold PS Audio to Steve Jeffery and Randy Patton in order to move to Colorado and start Genesis Technologies with Arnie. Seven years later, at about the same time as Arnie and I were getting a divorce from each other, Steve and Randy were doing the same thing (must have been something in the audiophile air).
The one remaining owner of PS Audio following Steve and Randy's breakup was Steve, who had heard I was no longer at Genesis and called me asking if I wanted to repurchase PS Audio. His asking price? $1.00. Clearly, there was nothing left of the company but the name; still, this was an amazingly generous act of kindness on the part of Steve (for which Terri and I have always been grateful).
Now jobless and living in Vail, Colorado with our four teenage sons, we were free from one company and eager to get started with revitalizing PS Audio. The company structure was simple. Terri ran the front end with all the accounting and sales, while I ran the back end with building a website, designing the products, and getting them made. Just the two of us along with our subcontractor, my dear friend and colleague, Rick Cullen back in California.
Simple, clean, but with one big problem.
We had nothing to sell.
Still, it was our baby, and Terri and I were happy to have it back (despite the fact "it" wasn't anything more than two initials famous in the audio industry).
I was free. Free to dream, free to invent, free to imagine what the next line of audio products might be. And dream I did. In fact, it's where the vision I have worked so hard towards over the last three decades originated: build an affordable state-of-the-art end-to-end hi-fi line that I would be thrilled to have in my home (a vision we finally completed in 2022 with the addition of Chris Brunhaver's Aspen speakers and the creation of Octave Records).
The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that's what I wanted to contribute to the high-end audio world – an end-to-end hand-curated system, from the AC outlet to your ears and everything in between.
As in any good story or novel, if you know what the ending looks like, the best place to start is the beginning – and that would be the AC wall socket.
At the time there was very little on the market for AC power products. If memory serves me, the only two products of any consequence were the Tice Power Block and the MIT Z-Stabilizer, along with a handful of off-the-shelf power wannabes.
George Tice had built a respectable power isolation getup using big isolation transformers that seemed to clean things up nicely, while Bruce Brisson's Z-Stabilizer was more of a parallel AC network said to do all sorts of great things.
Sonically, I wasn't happy with the bleaching of sound I experienced with the Tice products, but the MIT box seemed to help rather a lot (though I could not measure any improvements). But, clearly, getting the AC power right had a rather major impact on sound quality, something I already understood from years ago when Stan discovered the impact of using oversized power transformers – a practice we champion even to this day.
In the mid 1980s, Stan Warren (the “S” in PS Audio) had stumbled onto an amazing discovery. The bigger the power transformer, the better the sound. And this didn't really make sense. Think about it. A transformer capable of running a 200 watt-per-channel Class AB power amplifier capable of consuming 600 watts of power, being connected to a preamplifier that consumed no more than maybe 30 watts max, dramatically improved the sound of the preamplifier.
Bonkers, right?
Let's remind ourselves of a few things. First, power transformers take the AC out of the wall (120V or 230V) and through their coils of wire and magnetic coupling, they reduce (or increase) that voltage to what's needed for the circuit they are powering. So, let's imagine our preamplifier runs on +/-30 volts DC (which all of ours did). This means you need a bit more than the cumulative voltage (30 + 30 = 60 volts) so that your voltage regulators have headroom to do their business. So, let's imagine we want a total of 75 volts coming into our preamplifier. Great. As long as the power transformer feeding your preamplifier is big enough to supply that 75V to the preamp (without strain or loss) then all is good. Choose the smallest viable transformer for your circuit and you're in (transformers are expensive and you can usually price them by the pound).
But, here's the thing. While a minimum-size transformer is needed, there is no requirement for a maximum-sized transformer. In other words, once you satisfy the transformer size, you could then switch to a transformer the size of a Honda Civic and, as long as its output voltage is the same as a small transformer, it would theoretically perform the same. The preamplifier circuit shouldn't care it's connected to a beast or a wimp.
That thinking works well for slide rules and calculators, but not for sonic performance.
Our preamplifier was under development at the time, and Stan didn't have on hand the standard small power transformer we normally used. He did, however, have a same-voltage 'former used for our power amplifier. This sucker was easily 20 times the size we would ever consider using, but, what the heck?
He (and later me) nearly fell over. From the very first note, this preamp sounded out-of-this-world better than anything we had ever heard. And, it was thanks to the lower impedance and superior regulation provided by this massive power transformer.*
*Side note: this revelation would lead to our release of what we called the HCPS (High Current Power Supply), one of the world's first optional external power supplies available in high-end audio. It would also lead to the development of the PowerPlant AC regenerators).
This insight was clue number one on the trail for how to make a new "Blue Ocean" product.
Having discovered the importance of lowering the source impedance of the AC feeding a preamplifier or power amplifier, the positives and negatives I was hearing with the early crop of power conditioners were beginning to make sense.
Bruce Brisson's MIT Z-Stabilizer sounded significantly better than Tice's isolation transformers and I now knew part of the reason why: parallel conditioning versus series conditioning. The Z-Stabilizer featured a parallel network, which meant that it added no additional impedance to the AC power feeding my equipment. The Tice, on the other hand, did the opposite. It, like 99.9 percent of all power products, added to the series impedance, and that is why it sounded cleaner, yet bleached.
If I was going to change the world with a Blue Ocean product, I now understood it could not add to the series impedance of the AC power feeding the equipment.
At the same time, I also realized a basic problem with any parallel device: they don't do much. By their very nature they cannot do much, and this is because they can add to what is there but are unable to subtract something. Perhaps a good example of this can be found in a power supply where we rely upon a parallel process to get the results we want. In any AC-to-DC supply (which is inside all of our stereo equipment), we have a pretty important parallel element: capacitors. These instantaneous energy storage and release devices are like little buckets. When they are empty they will greedily suck power from the wall and fill themselves once every 50th or 60th of a second. Once full, they regurgitate that energy back onto the line in a sort of see saw manner of sucking and spewing (we can get into the details of this in a later post but suffice it to say the reason we want this activity is to fill in the gaps of AC in our quest to make smooth and constant DC).
The more of these parallel caps you add the better they work in this scenario. So, this is a pretty good example of how a parallel process is beneficial. It's additive. Problem is, it can't work in the other direction. In order to remove something, you need to add back in a series element which, as we now know, is something we want to avoid because it adds impedance and, impedance in line with our AC power is the enemy of good sound. It holds back a product's potential and the tradeoff between the cleaning it can provide versus the degradation it wreaks is not worth the price asked.
There had to be another way.
Once you know something you can't un-know it.
Learning that impedance in the AC line is the enemy of good sound unlocked Pandora's Box, unleashing an entirely new set of problems I never knew were there.
Having just figured out that the elephant in the room was that 99.9 percent of all power conditioners were designed in such a way that it made worse an already bad problem – and that nothing in the world of passive components (inductors, capacitors, resistors) could make it better – I began to realize there was an even bigger elephant in the room. To make a pun, the next problem was a mammoth of a problem.
The AC wiring in our homes.
Dang it. There seemed a conspiracy afoot! No sooner had I realized technology's solution to one problem (dirty power) was exacerbating an even bigger problem (AC line impedance), the futility of the next one boggled the mind.
All wire has impedance (resistance). The longer the wire, the greater the impedance. For example, most homes are wired inside the walls with 14-gauge copper. This thickness of wire adds about 2.5 ohms of resistance per every 1,000 feet. That's a problem. Consider the probable length of wire connecting your hi-fi equipment to the source of AC power – somewhere in your neighborhood, sitting either underground or high atop a utility pole, is a big power transformer. It could be literally a mile or more away from your home.
Ugh. Big problem. Here I was, worrying about milliohms (one-thousandth of an Ohm) getting in the way of our musical pleasure, and it had just occurred to me that there were thousands upon thousands of these unwanted milliohms between me and my source of power.
I can't avoid the necessity of my home having to be connected to the utility company's power source.
Good lord!
And, while I was stressing about this latest problem, yet another was rearing its ugly head. One that was potentially even worse. But what’s the old saying? "Things always get worse before they get better."
Once I had realized the main culprit to holding back the performance of our beloved hi-fi systems was the impedance of the AC power delivered to our wall sockets, and then got slapped over the head with the worse news ever, that the very means by which power is delivered into our homes – the wires themselves – was making the problem so much worse, I was half-ready to throw in the towel on my dream project.
And then things went even further downhill.
I knew that the AC power leaving my city's power generating station was a beautiful sine wave – exactly what the Hi-Fi Doctor ordered. Pure, clean, steady power. What I had never stopped to consider, though, was the quality of the sine wave after it traveled through miles and miles of wires and transformers before reaching my home. And if that weren't enough, I figured out an even bigger issue – sharing. We share the power grid with industry, stores, and worst of all, our neighbors. Yup. That neighbor next door? You know, then one with the irritating barking dog? You share your power with them. And why does that matter? Because the more people using the power at the same time, the worse the shape of the sine wave gets. In fact, because all AC power sine waves are synchronized in time, whenever the sine wave rises to the top of its range for me, it is doing the same for every single person on the same grid throughout the state.
And what that means is that at the peak of the sine wave, right when we most need it to be full and beautiful, it's often clipped and hideous. Looks something like this:
When this happens, it means the energy we need to charge up our capacitors is missing. Gone.
When does the bad news stop?
Think about where I now am at in my quest. I now understand the following:
- The single most important aspect to getting great sound from our equipment is achieved by lowering the impedance of the AC power.
- Any power conditioner that effectively cleans the power does so by adding impedance and thus, we get cleaner sound but at a cost in sonics we're unwilling to pay.
- The only effective way of improving the AC quality is by placing something in series and that doesn't work (see point 2).
- Our homes are connected via hundreds and hundreds of feet of wire that adds resistance and makes this worse.
- And even if we were to get around those issues, the actual quality of the sine wave sucks.
I was in a real pickle. All I could see in front of me was bad news getting worse.
Then, I had an idea. A flash idea that just popped into my head.
To be continued in Issue 213.
This article was previously published in a series of "Paul's Posts" and has been edited for Copper.
Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/distelAPPArath.
