After getting to know SoundSpace Systems speakers in detail over the past few years, I certainly did not expect their new product to be AC Power Conditioner.
But then again, Dr. Michael Plessmann is no ordinary audiophile and music lover. His restless mind is always on the lookout for new ways to take his beloved creations to the next level, and as you can learn throughout the review, the SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner has become a fundamental part of SoundSpace Systems’ balancing act.
The compact sound optimizer.
The quality of the power supply plays a big role in high-end audio and even more so with SoundSpace Systems speakers that are designed from the ground up to reproduce every detail of the signal, and that includes revealing any distortions coming from the power supply.
That’s why they took this issue seriously and have developed their own Power Conditioner.
SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner is designed to be an assertive device that improves power supply, and electromagnetic compatibility and eliminates radio interferences.
Operational
The foundation of any sound system is electricity. Unfortunately, too little attention is paid to it. With AC, the devil is in the details. The underlying technology is over a hundred years old and was developed for light bulbs and electric motors, but not for powering the sensitive analog and digital circuitry in audio and video systems.
Especially due to the rapidly increasing transmission of signals over power lines and in combination with voltage fluctuations and overloaded power lines (e.g. due to phase angle control), our power grid is more and more reaching its limits. This is a catastrophe for the sound of audio equipment.
The sensitive components of a high-end audio system urgently call for a “clean” alternating current. Due to the numerous disturbances in the power lines, up to one-third of the high-resolution audio signal is either lost, masked, or strongly distorted at low levels.
This interference affects the signal circuit and permanently contorts or corrupts the source signal. To cope with ever-increasing bandwidths and dynamic ranges, interference should be kept to a minimum over a wide frequency range.
At this point, SoundSpace Systems has begun to further optimize the sound of their loudspeakers and the entire audio system. And they believe that their sound engineer has found the philosopher’s stone – the result has convinced everyone so far.
Many power conditioners available on the market noticeably limit the dynamics of music reproduction, so that one buys the advantages with greater disadvantages. This was unacceptable to SoundSpace Systems, so they chose a different approach.
SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner is a passive filter and consists only of coils and capacitors. They deliberately eliminated resistors and there is no power switch to keep internal resistance as low as possible. The coils are current compensated, which means that there are several windings of the same direction on a common core.
In this way, they suppress asymmetrical and common-mode interference currents flowing in the same direction on the supply lines. On the other hand, they provide very little inductance for the operating current flowing in the push-pull direction (i.e. in the opposite direction on both lines).
Consequently, the resulting magnetic fields of a push-pull current cancel each other out and can no longer generate a magnetic field in the core, thus developing the highest effectiveness.
The capacitors used are special safety interference suppression capacitors, namely X capacitors for attenuating push-pull interference voltages and Y capacitors for suppressing common-mode interference.
SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner comes in a compact Corian enclosure and offers the following advantages:
- supplies “clean” low impedance power to the system
- eliminates common-mode and push-pull interference
- reduces radio interference
- available with CH, EU, UK, and US connectors, others on request
- suitable for all audio and AV systems
- improves the sound of any audio system
- two models are available: model 1 with up to 3,000 W and model 2 with up to 6,900 W power handling.
The Music
Anyone can wonder how good our auditory memory is, and that’s why auditory protocols backed up with the listening logs are crucial to put everything into a subjectively objective form. Below are some reference tracks and albums where the impact of the SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner is easily evident.
It was more than interesting to observe the effect of the SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner with Derek Bailey & Henry Kaiser – Wireforks. It was a clear example, proof and testament of how pure energetic effect can magnetize the listener with inticing interaction with music.
SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner purred the energy to the music instead of drawing it away. SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner crossed the threshold of “just fine” with a greater than expected dynamic inner mechanism that allowed mass migration of overlaying notes, plucking sounds and ambient cues.
SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner purred the energy to the music instead of drawing it away. SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner crossed the threshold of “just fine” with a greater than expected dynamic inner mechanism that allowed mass migration of overlaying notes, plucking sounds and ambient cues.
This continued with “The Hell Hounds” of Krim King Crimson, which cemented and fixed the unique experience of three drum kits hitting hard at once.
SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner is internally equipped with a highly effective core that syncs with the dynamics of the music and freely maps the music onto the sonic canvas, with a remarkable positive shift in the spatial distances of the drums as well as sharper, more lifelike leading edges of the notes.
Many power conditioners can round off the leading edges and alter and morph the attacks, decays, sustain and release of notes. Not so the SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner!
Judy Collins’s “Maid of constant sorrow” touches on a slightly different kind of subtlety and very quickly everything can become tonally disoriented.
The SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner has introduced a unique directionality to the music, acting autonoeic and bypassing the sensual guardians.
Something I do not often stumble upon. It also did not inflect Collin’s voice, which again, many power conditioners can alter.
And the showcase of separate yet unified trajectories continued with Sheila Armstrong’s “Frauenliebe und Leben” with even more emotional connection and sonic organelle happening.
With SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner Armstrong’s voice was rendered with more plasticity, without contrivances and gimmickry, away from relentlessness, with the upshot of fluidity.
To verify what is going on in another complex musical sphere, I listened to “All Is Full of Love” by Bjork over and over again for many listening sessions.
This hymn to love, embedded in a synthetic yet mysteriously organic crux, gained a better orientation in the sonic space, a heightened spatial awareness took place, and I had to look up a few times and take note of what was happening with the focus and detail entering the listening space. This is not what I would call a casual change in performance.
The sonic and musical excitement continued with Chris Thile’s “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground” from the album of the same name, recorded with two Telefunken 251 microphones. A very interesting recording that holds a lot of hidden potentials and challenges the best of the systems.
SoundSpace Systems’ AC power conditioner enlivened the music with an enticing presence that is rare, and Thile’s soothing voice gained a forte, a kind of topophilia, with more natural crystalline.
The intense connection SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner can grant continued with “Pekka Pohjola – Sekoilu Seestyy (Madness Subsides)” from the album Harakka Bialoipokku, where many will recognize the origin of the DJ Shadow samples from the timeless hip-hop masterpiece “Endtroducing”.
“Pekka Pohjola – Sekoilu Seestyy (Madness Subsides)” evolved more continuously and coherent, and subliminally spacey Wurlitzer phasing has become more volatile in a good sense.
Some power conditioners can significantly mess up timing and spatial cues, morphing “Pekka Pohjola – Sekoilu Seestyy (Madness Subsides)” into confusément la grandeur de l’exploit instead of mapping designated positions and coordinates, which together with other attributes can spark most compelling motive force.
There are many contradictions and opprobrium associated with products related to power and electricity, but SoundSpace Systems AC has proven that it is quite different throughout the vast database of music databases where it can bundle musical commonalities, improve perception, and put the conceptualization into working practice.
Conclusion
Statistical theorists draw inductive conclusions. In audio, especially anything involving electricity we dip more in-depth into the world of inductive inference via deductive inference where the analog domain deals mostly with continuous signals, and in the digital domain with timing pulses.
SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner was designed from the beginning to deal with analog voltage deflection and is an antidote to the many similar devices that drain the power from the system instead of providing it or kept intact.
The SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner operates without vicarious fuss and escapes the languid modus operandi that many power conditioners, regardless of price, do not. It operates in the background, without being invasive, but still does its job remarkably well.
As with high-end audio cables, the power conditioners extrapolate the result with the rest of the system and associated paraphernalia. The synergy is of utmost importance, and this calls for experimentation within the setup.
The SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner keeps the momentum of the music going, and this was also surprisingly felt in the sub 40 Hz range, where the fundamentals of psychoacoustics are in play, that affect the formation of our perception of mids and highs.
I also found that the structural formation of the three-dimensional space is much more tangible, the dynamic actions more lively, and with better-distributed spatiality.
With SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner, the music dynamics were freely defined without losing the fixed information, so it did not sound scribbled.
Many power conditioners operate in the shifted and displaced efficiency region, where the sound swing becomes anisotropic
The SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner takes care of grid anomalies and allows for natural generalization without removing superimposed harmonics or blurring the texture and fleetness of the music.
The SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner, on the other hand, has a unique propagation speed where the fundamentals are cemented in place without changing the sonic characteristics.
The music appears from Musou blacks with a sense of Hilbert’s space. Music is infinitely dimensional and this German power conditioner crux emerges from that foundation.
In electrical power, we cannot escape any kind of inductance, reductants, and deductive phenomena.
In today’s world, especially in high-end audio, it’s all about the integrity of the power, where stable voltages and currents should arrive from source to destination unaltered.
SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner optimizes the flow of energy while expanding spatiality, reducing noise, and increasing transparency and density but does not affect tonality, timbre, and color.
Overall, SoundSpace Systems AC Power Conditioner provides remarkable balance when used either before or after the power ladder or with a single component.
The multiple practical implementations of the SoundSpace Systems AC power conditioner are possible, but this will certainly be costly.
On the other hand, both the SoundSpace Systems Model 1 and Model 1 are quite modest in price compared to many competing products on the market, and the impressively effecting journey can start with a single device. ⧉
Pricing
- Model 1 -2150 Euro (exkl. VAT)
- Model 2 – 2600 Euro (exkl. VAT)
Specifications
Contact
SoundSpaceSystems GmbH
Sensburger Allee 5A
14055 Berlin
Germany
Email: info@soundspacesystems.com
Tel: +49 (0)30 91 45 99 73