I have just installed a pair of mains conditioners (Tacima).
I have one with all the switch mode PSUs in the HiFi/AV system, the other has all the kit with linear supplies, other than the power amp which is direct to the wall.
This has given as big an improvement as going from a Pi 1 with USB optical out to a 3+ Digione (I’ve not bothered to try the old kit with the filtering). The Apple TV 3 sounds a lot better too.
The pre-amp is is a Marantz AV9000
The Tacima is just a current compensated choke and some surge suppressor. Nothing realy special…
But unless you’re putting it on the power amplifier (and don’t want your transients squashed) I don’t see why it would need to be anything special.
A pair of them were under half the price of the player, and gave a bigger improvement. (Though I suspect it was needed to allow the new player to show what it is capable of, and the old player would not have delivered anything like the same results.)
It surprised me how big a difference clean electricity made to the sound. (Since the pre-amp manufacturers could quite easily have fitted the same filtering internally).
That’s exactly what manufactures of source devices, as well as preamplifiers should do these days. There are a lot of other (RF) signals on the line beside power… Just consider power line LAN…
What’s in the referenced distribution strip is what a EMC filtered device IEC inlet offers on a lower power rating. I wolud like to see such inlets on every device of lower power rating from stock!
But with commercial audio, every penny counts! You will not find such inlets in devices below let’s say 1000EUR?
Or even THX certified AV kit with a bigger list price, it seems.
But given the cost of each filtered 6 way power block is under £40 (And presumably similarly priced items are available for other countries’ sockets) and the physical quality of the device justifies at least half of that, my experience suggests that it is worth investing in. before spending much bigger sums.
For example I could have bought a new pre-amp/DAC for many hundreds and it might have been exactly the same quality as my existing one, except for decent filtering, and I would have got the same improvement.
(On my system the filters have improved the quality such that good 128 streaming radio sounds better than lossless did without, and lossless is better than I thought the system would be capable of)
Attending to my electricity was as a result of watching Hans Beekhuyzen on YouTube and extrapolating.
You’ll find that getting a good separate mains ring/spur with hard wired 30A fuse wire and shielded good mains cable will give you much better results and you will get rid of any filtering which interferes with the mains to your audio system. (Make sure there is nothing else plugged into your new ring) Use the filtering for TVs and fridges so they don’t feed crap into your mains.
A completely separate ring/spur would be the ideal, solving the issue for the power amp. However, I cannot see any way a filter would degrade the sound of anything other than a non class A power amp.