NIAGARA 3000
The Niagara 3000 features our patented AC Ground-Noise Dissipation, the widest bandwidth-linearized AC filter in the industry, and our unique passive/active Transient Power Correction Circuit. Boasting an instantaneous current reservoir of over 55 amps peak, the Niagara 3000 is specifically designed for today’s current-starved power amplifiers. Many AC power products featuring “high-current outlets” merely minimize current compression; the Niagara 3000 corrects it.
The science of AC power delivery is not a simple one; it demands focus, and the devil is in the details. In fact, the great increase in airborne and AC-line-transmitted radio signals, combined with overtaxed utility lines and the ever-increasing demands from high-definition audio/video components, has rendered our utilities’ AC power a somewhat antiquated technology.
Where Alternating Current (AC) is concerned, we’re relying on a century-old technology created for incandescent lights and electric motors—technology that was certainly never meant to power the sophisticated analog and digital circuits used in today’s premium audio/video systems. To properly accommodate the promise of today’s ever-increasing bandwidth and dynamic range, we must achieve extraordinarily low noise across a very wide range of frequencies.
Further, today’s power amplifiers are being taxed for instantaneous peak-current demand, even when they’re driven at modest volumes. Although we have seen a substantial increase in dynamics from much of our audio software, the loudspeakers we employ to reproduce them are often no more efficient than they were two to four decades ago. This places great demands on an amplifier’s power supply, as well as the source AC power supplying it.
Our systems’ sensitive components need better alternating current—a fact that has resulted in a host of AC power conditioning, isolation transformer, regeneration amplifier, and battery back-up system topologies. Through differential sample tests and spectrum analysis, it can be proven that up to a third of a high-resolution (low-level) audio signal can be lost, masked, or highly distorted by the vast levels of noise riding along the AC power lines that feed our components. This noise couples into the signal circuitry as current noise and through AC ground, permanently distorting and/or masking the source signal.
Given that the stakes are so high, all sincere attempts to solve this problem must be applauded.
Once the audio/video signal is gone, it’s gone forever…
For AudioQuest, honoring the source is never a matter of simply using premium “audiophile-grade parts” or relying on a proprietary technology—common approaches within our community. For years, we have all been witness to the same, seemingly endless audiophile debates: valves versus transistors; analog versus digital; can cables really make a difference?; and on and on. While we, too, can brag about our many unique technologies, we realize that true audio/video optimization is never a matter of any one secret or exotic circuit. When it comes to noise filtering for AC power, many approaches can yield meaningful results. However, these approaches may also impart ringing, current compression, and non-linear distortions that can render the cure worse than the disease!
The Niagara 3000 features our patented AC Ground-Noise Dissipation, the widest bandwidth-linearized AC filter in the industry, and our unique passive/active Transient Power Correction Circuit. Boasting an instantaneous current reservoir of over 55 amps peak, the Niagara 3000 is specifically designed for today’s current-starved power amplifiers. Many AC power products featuring “high-current outlets” merely minimize current compression; the Niagara 3000 corrects it.