Do You Need a Power Conditioner? How to Decide for the Studio

When producers picture the act of experimenting with studio gear, power conditioners don’t typically top their list. Instead, it’s units like delays, reverbs, and compressors that come to mind when audio engineers consider getting creative.

When it comes to the design phase, however, there’s plenty of space for inspiration – even for gear that doesn’t seem sexy on the surface. Ask anybody who’s set out to build a better mousetrap for speaker stands, cue systems, patchbays, or acoustic panels, and they’ll tell you: There’s a unique thrill in levelling up studio components that are supposedly unremarkable.

What is an audio power conditioner?

Power conditioners often fall into this unglamorous category, attracting technicians in search of a new angle for this often-overlooked studio tool.

What is a power conditioner? In the studio, a power conditioner exists to clean the electricity that drives gear, delivering power that’s free from interference. This helps to combat the hazards of standard electrical supplies, which often display issues such as voltage fluctuations, electromagnetic interference, and noise that can degrade audio quality. Left unchecked, dirty power can introduce hums, buzzes, and static into the signal path.

Power conditioners typically comprise a surge protector, noise filters, and outlets, among other features. They may also include additional components such as a voltage regulator and isolation transformers. Put together, they serve to eliminate high frequency noise and protect gear from dangerous voltage events – the kind of spikes capable of frying that prized 1176 you just won on Ebay.

“Audio is unique when it comes to electricity, in that it’s more susceptible to issues like noise in electricity than almost anything in your house is,” explains Seth Berman, the creative mind behind Chicago-based Black Lion Audio’s power conditioning program. “When electricians wire up a house or an office building, audio noise is not really top of mind to them. They’re thinking, ‘How do you get a TV to turn on? How do you make sure the lights can turn off?’

Seth Berman of Black Lion Audio

“There’s a lot of issues that can be built into house walls that introduce noise into your audio system,” he continues. “Power conditioning is generally the easiest way to deal with that, by doing its absolute best to filter out those inherent noises of different electricity types coming into the system.” The shortcomings of mainstream residential and commercial electrical wiring matter to anyone who’s serious about music and sound production, since they could negatively impact a recording, mixing, or mastering project.

“Any type of noise that is being introduced into your system — if it’s not being filtered out or cleaned up — could potentially affect your mixing decisions,” Berman says. “Even if you’re hearing something that’s only in the monitoring system and not the recording itself, you’re making decisions based on a different noise floor of what’s actually in the recording. On the incoming signal side, you could potentially lose dynamic range if noise is in the recording, because you now have to compensate for less dynamic range and headroom due to noise taking up some of your signal.

“There’s no upside to noise. The better you do at getting rid of it, the more headroom and breathing room you have in your recording to work with.”

Electricity for Audio: Facts, Myths, and Misperceptions

Highlight-worthy gear design projects often fall in the realm of the Heritage Audio MOTORCITY Equalizer, a recreation of the classic analog 7-band Motown EQ. Berman and his team got a serious charge out of collaborating with Heritage Audio and super mixer Michael Brauer on that build, but it was just one of many projects that Berman has prioritized.

He found himself equally excited to break new ground with the Black Lion Audio line of power conditioners, which include the PG-1 MK2, PG-2, PG-P portable power conditioner, and flagship PG-2R Voltage Regulator. In the process, he became intimately familiar with the varied perceptions – both good and bad – that audio engineers have about power conditioners.

“One of the biggest myths about power and conditioning is that it is an end-all quick fix to noise, which very often it isn’t,” notes Berman. “It is the easiest solution and in most cases it’s the best solution. But in reality, the even better solution is figuring out where the noise is coming from and doing your best to kill it at the source.

“95% of people are never going to bring in an electrician, tear out their walls, and swap out Romex wire for metal-clad shielded electrical wire,” he continues. “You’re never going to really worry about every little thing, making sure you have no ground loops. Most people will never really be able to do most of that. So for a lot of people, power conditioning is actually the easiest and best solution, without having to go to the extreme lengths of doing things the absolute best way.”

Scouring the web is sure to uncover videos and articles that question whether power conditioning is needed at all, with audio engineers opining strongly on both sides of the debate. “There’s an ongoing argument about it because there are so many factors that go into system noise,” Berman says. “One person can have one system where power conditioning makes a world of difference, and another system in which it makes no difference. It all depends on what type of noise it is, and where the noise is coming from.

“The more you need power conditioning, the more effect it’s going to have. You could have a lab setting where everything was custom-designed top to bottom, and you could say, ‘I see no difference with power conditioning,’ but in that case it’s because the issue that power conditioning fixes isn’t there to begin with.”

“How Do We Make It Cooler?”

When Berman and his team dug into creating a highly effective power conditioner for the studio, the result was the Black Lion PG-2R. A power conditioner and voltage regulator, the 2RU unit provides 12 switched, filtered and surge-protected outlets, voltage and amperage meters and a meter noting the number of regulation stages currently in effect for real-time analysis, and two filtered convenience outlets. Additional features include a pair of front panel USB chargers and two XLR lamp connectors.

The PG-2R voltage regulator and power conditioner from Black Lion Audio.

“We see the audio industry as constantly improving when it comes to things like interfaces, preamps, and monitors,” Berman says. “But there are certain parts that kind of got left behind, where you see the same technology and building methods that were available 30 years ago are the same ones that are being used today. For example, Black Lion got into the patchbay world recently and we said, ‘OK, patchbays are a totally uninteresting thing. Nobody is excited to go and get a patch bay. How do we make a patch bay cool?’

“We took the same approach when it came to our power conditioners. We said, ‘How do we take this thing that people get as a functional add-on to their system and make it better? How do we make it cooler? How do we make you excited to get it into your system?’”

Given the proverbial blank slate to design a next-generation studio power conditioner and voltage regulator, Black Lion researched how audio engineers’ power needs had evolved. In the process, they identified key functionality and feature gaps that an updated offering could fill.

“If we had made [the PG-2R], say, 40 years ago before the advent of real digital technology, these power conditioners would have just been filtering out noise that would be found in analog gear,” Berman notes. “As equipment is evolving, equipment power needs are also evolving. Black Lion has patented clocking technology which revolves around things that can add jitter to your system that aren’t necessarily just due to the clock itself.

“A lot of our technology deals with, ‘How do you stop noise from getting into equipment that can induce jitter between your clock and the rest of your system, or how do you stop the noise from getting into your interface that will potentially increase jitter?’ We put that thought process into designing our power conditioner, so we have different types of power conditioning in the same unit that affect different types of noise.”

As an example, Berman points to the PG-2R’s bank of 12 back panel switched, filtered, and surge-protected outlets that are combined into four groups: Digital Audio, Analog Audio, and High Current.

“The ‘analog’ outlets filter out noise that specifically affects analog gear,” he says. “The ‘digital’ bank is less focused on analog noise, and more focused on the type of noise that can induce jitter in your interface or your converters.”

Another opportunity to update power conditioner design came from adapting to today’s laptop-centric studio environment. “We realized many studios now have moved away from the desktop world and are laptop-based,” says Berman. “That’s why we built a laptop charger into the front of the PG-2R so that anybody can just throw their MacBook Pro on their desk and plug the single USBC Thunderbolt cable directly into their power conditioner to keep the laptop charged, so they don’t need their power brick anymore.”

Power Conditioners, Clocking, and Jitter

An often-overlooked aspect of power conditioning is its impact on clocking and jitter in digital gear.

Berman offers up a quick review of clocking and jitter to explain the relationship. “If you’re connecting two pieces of digital gear together, they are talking to each other at whatever the sample rate is,” he explains. “Say you’re recording at 44.1 kHz, this means that 44,100 times a second a burst of information is being sent from one device and received by the other device, which wants to see everything at exactly the right time. Put another way, the source device wants to send 44,100 signals a second, and the receiving device wants to receive that information 44,100 times a second at the right time.

“Jitter is almost like an error in the timing of those information bursts,” Berman continues. “The further off those 44,100 bursts of information are, the more jitter you have, which means the information on the receiving end is not being received at the time that it should be. That affects sound because the more jitter you have, the more you get something called ‘phase smearing,’ which is a phase issue in the high end. You start losing reverb trails, you lose a little bit of clarity. It’s less focused-sounding, less three-dimensional.

“And that’s only on the audio side of clocking. On the functional side, if the jitter becomes too high, you can lose sync to the extent that the receiving and sending devices are no longer able to talk. That’s why you want to keep jitter as low as absolutely possible – not only to make sure everything stays clocked and locked together, but also so that your audio can sound its best. By having power conditioning that can ensure the clock signal is as clean and quiet as possible, you minimize the chance of jitter being introduced into the system.”

Getting the Design Right

Designing the PG-2R was an opportunity for Black Lion to go beyond the functionality of its legacy power conditioner offerings, the PG-1 and PG-2. As the team discovered, however, every new feature brought unforeseen complexities that they’d have to manage.

Black Lion’s PG-1 mkII power conditioner.

A priority for the new model was to include a voltage regulator, which guards against voltage fluctuations to maintain a steady output voltage of 120v (within a plus or minus two-volt tolerance).  “It’s a lot more complex than our previous power conditioners were because it does an entire extra function,” Berman says. “Let’s say you’re running too much gear — like you have two guitar amps going and your voltage starts drooping — the PG-2R can bring the power back up to about 120 volts. Or maybe it’s the wintertime, when electrical companies might give you a little extra power to compensate for power draw across the power grid, you’ll see voltage go up and the PG-2R will pull the power back down to 120 volts.”

Although it seemed simple at first, adding the front-mounted USB ports for laptop charging raised many more questions. “We realized we had to ask, ‘What is the maximum amount of power really needed? What are the different models that users are going to be using with this?’ There are a million different PC laptops, there’s 10 different Mac laptops, so how do we make sure that our USB charging actually does work with all these models?

“There’s a lot that goes into power conditioning. Once you start adding all these features you see that the more complex an electrical system gets, the more likely they are to introduce their own noise. So the design process was about, ‘How do we add all these different features while still ensuring that our power conditioning retains all of its noise reduction functionality as well as the additional ability to regulate?’”

As the PG-2R design team knocked down each new challenge, Berman saw the extra importance of getting things exactly right in power conditioning. “If a preamp fails, it just stops working – when a power conditioner fails, it has the potential to affect everything that’s plugged into it,” he notes. “You have to be a lot more careful about every single decision that’s made, every component choice when it comes to getting approval from the compliance agencies.

“For every single country a power conditioner is being sold to, you must be sure that you’re following the compliance laws of that country. So there’s many more considerations about safety, wire gauge, and other aspects that normally don’t go into designing analog gear.”

Benefits Beyond Audio

Many producers and engineers will opt for a power conditioner with an audio fidelity upgrade in mind. However, there are other advantages of power conditioning that activate its ROI in the studio.

“There are a couple of power conditioner benefits that I would say are just as — if not more — important to gear than the audio benefits: safety and longevity,” says Berman. “I’ll point to the PG-2R as an example. All power conditioners also act as surge protectors, with the ability to absorb a finite amount of electrical surge from a wall. If you were to, let’s say, plug your gear directly into the wall and you have a massive surge into your system, that power surge could potentially take out your system.

“Power conditioners can absorb a massive amount of a surge, so that surge never really makes it to the gear. Very often when you get those $5 surge protectors from a supermarket or online, they can absorb some or most of that surge. The problem is, once a surge protector receives too much of a surge, it stops acting like a surge protector and starts acting almost like an unprotected splitter — and in many cases, you don’t know when that actually happens. You could feel safe thinking your system is protected – but in reality, the surge has already happened, the unit did its job, and you have absolutely no way of knowing whether it’s going to protect you from the next surge. (Editor’s note: Surge protectors can also simply wear out over time.)

“That’s why our power conditioners, and most other power conditioners, have an array of lights on them that let you know that it’s still doing its job: whether it’s still filtering, whether your ground is okay, or whether protection is still available. A power conditioner allows you to not only potentially get rid of noise issues but allows you to protect your equipment and know that it is still protecting your equipment — as opposed to assuming that it’s still protecting your equipment.”

When it comes to keeping gear going longer, power conditioners can play a valuable role in the studio ecosystem. “There’s a longevity benefit with power conditioning when it comes to your gear,” Berman says. “That’s because gear that’s running high voltage has its own regulators in it, where it takes an incoming voltage and then sends out the proper voltage to certain parts of the circuit.

“Almost all analog gear has that. The problem is, the way it accomplishes this is by using little regulators to turn the extra- or under-voltage into heat, which is not good for equipment in the long run. Sooner or later heat can potentially cause gear to blow. By having a regulator before your gear, you know that it is always running at roughly 120 volts, so your regulators are working as close as absolutely possible to the perfect incoming voltage for them. That minimizes the amount of work that they have to do, which extends the life of the gear itself.” 

How to Get Started with Power Conditioning in the Studio

Once an audio engineer commits to integrating a power conditioner into their setup, they’ll find they have a wide array of options, each providing its own unique set of capabilities, features, and price. Berman has tips for narrowing down the search, so creators can get what they need without overspending.

“When somebody says, ‘What power conditioner do I need?’ The first thing I ask is, ‘What are you trying to achieve?’” says Berman. “If you’re just trying to protect your system, a model with the most amount of protection might be the best option for you. If you’re trying to make it as quiet as possible, maybe it’s the one with the most filtering. If you have a laptop, maybe the one with the laptop charger is the best option. If you want all of the above, all those features built into one could be right for you.”

At the same time, it’s important to be realistic about the limitations of power conditioning. “If there is a big issue with your electricity to begin with, power conditioners can only do so much,” Berman stresses. “If you have a massive amount of DC offset coming into your system, or you share a building with a factory that does welding, there’s only so much it can do — it’s not going to be an end-all solution to everything every time. Likewise, if you have a guitar amp that’s introducing electromagnetic noise into the single coil pickups of your Stratocaster, a power conditioner might not be the solution there either.

“It all depends on what your needs are. Generally, my approach is to get the best one you can afford because you’ll never regret having one that works beyond your needs. The more features it has and the better job it does are only better for you and your system.”

For those who decide to move forward and acquire a power conditioner, integrating it into an audio setup is relatively easy. Step One: “Unplug everything!” Berman laughs. “Literally unplug all of your cables and start fresh – there’s nothing worse than trying to figure out how to integrate a new type of power scheme into an existing system.

“The best way to do it is to say, ‘I’m starting new on power,’” he continues. “Plug your power conditioner into the wall, and you might say, ‘OK, I’ve got four pieces of analog gear, four pieces of digital gear, two monitors, and two subwoofers. Now what?’ Then you do your best to plug them all into that single power conditioner. The more things in your studio that all go back to a central point, the more likely you are to avoid ground loops, which is ground finding multiple ways to get back out of your building. The more ground loops you have, the more likely you are to introduce hum. If you have a single cable going into your wall and then all your gear going into your power conditioner, the chance of any type of ground loop hum has been greatly minimized.”

In the case of the Black Lion Audio PG-2R, users can match up their personal gear categories with the four different sets of optimized outlets that are available. “When you look at the back of the PG-2R, you’ll see that you have four analog outputs,” says Berman. “So you say, ‘What gear is most likely to pick up noise that can be heard in analog gear?’ Those four will go into your power constraint in the analog inputs. Next ask, ‘What is digital? What is an interface? What is a computer? What is more likely to get affected by jitter?’ Those go into your digital outputs.

“Another important question to pose is, ‘What is most likely to be turned on last?’ Most Black Lion models have sequencing built in to turn on gear in a specific order, which avoids that pop of turning on pieces of gear in the wrong order — that burst that could potentially take out your studio monitors, tweeters or woofers. To guard against that, we have ‘high current’ outputs for components like studio monitors or subs. They get plugged into that output, which has analog filtering, but it’s time delayed to guarantee that those turn on last to avoid that pop.”

PG-2R users can plug in their devices in sequence to avoid audio pops when powering on and off.

Besides cleaning up the audio itself, Berman has seen how integrating a power conditioner can bring welcome feng shui to systems that have devolved into power cable chaos. “To recap: When you’re introducing a power conditioner, unplug everything and then start over,” Berman urges. “That’s the best time to clean up your wires and make sure you don’t have extra slack. Then one piece of gear at a time, just start plugging things into the back of a power conditioner.

“By the time you’re done, because you’ve started out almost from zero, you’ve gotten rid of most of the factors that introduce noise like massive cables running back and forth, or the rat’s nest of cable under your desk lines crossing each other. When you approach things from a fresh mind, the cleaner it’ll be.”

Try It LIVE

While the impact of power conditioning will vary from studio to studio, its usefulness in the live sound realm is something that performing producers can bank on.

“Every working musician has played that bar that has light dimmers and shares the electrical line with an industrial kitchen and a dishwasher in the back,” Berman says. “Or there’s so many things getting plugged in onstage that your gear has hum and noise. That’s why every traveling musician and venue should have power conditioners for live use.

“If you’re a traveling musician, you should have a power conditioner in your rack that helps filter out the noise of that venue. While in your studio you have a lot more control over the way that things are done, when you’re going from venue to venue, you have very little control of how that venue is going to be wired — you’re at the mercy of what else is going on there. A power conditioner takes uncertainty out of that.”

No Noise! Adopting a New Mindset

As a gear design pro who’s seen his fair share of work emerge into studio setups worldwide – as well as many an experiment that never made it past the prototype phase – Seth Berman absorbed some valuable audio fundamentals from his work on power conditioning.

“When you get into a mindset of, ‘What causes noise, where does noise come from, where does hum come from?’ it makes you hyperfocus on those things in your mix,” he reflects. “You realize how important a good noise floor is, and how important gain staging is: applying gain before noise, not after it. By thinking about where noise comes from, you get a lot better when it comes to minimizing noise in the production process.

“Now you’re not just thinking from a power perspective. Your mindset becomes about keeping noise out of your gain structure or keeping gain noise out of your equipment by making sure you’re using the right cables. By getting into the mindset of keeping power as clean as possible, keeping jitter as low as possible, you progress to, ‘I figured out how to improve this one part of my system. Now what’s the next weakest chain link in the chain? How do I make that part better?’ You realize that noise and distortion are part of a much bigger picture – by hitting it at every point in the process, it makes the entire picture better.”

— David Weiss is an Editor for SonicScoop.com, and has been covering pro audio developments for over 25 years. He is also the co-author of the music industry’s leading textbook on synch licensing, “Music Supervision, 2^nd Edition: The Complete Guide to Selecting Music for Movies, TV, Games & New Media.” Email: david@sonicscoop.com

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