“Until the GigaWatt PowerMaster arrived at my house, I hadn’t thought a lot about reviewing additional power conditioners. As I mentioned, I’ve been very happy with the AudioQuest Niagara 3000 I’ve been using for the past few years. I’m still happy with the 3000, and I’ll return to it once the PowerMaster is shipped back to Mark Sossa. The Niagara retails for just $3,000, and I haven’t heard anything for that price that beats it. Since then, I’ve reviewed two more power conditioners in the last eight years, one from Equi=Tech and one from Telos Audio. Both are far more expensive than the AudioQuest, and both were predictably more effective at lowering the noise floor in my review system.
The GigaWatt PowerMaster, however, is obviously in a different class than most of the power conditioners I’ve auditioned. While $32K might seem like a lot of money for what one friend of mine calls “a fancy power strip,” it’s not in the context of an ultra high-end audio system where a single power cord might cost even more. From the first listening session, it was obvious that the GigaWatt was taking my system to a new level I haven’t heard before, one that’s not only silent but supremely confident in the quality of that silence. With the GigaWatt PowerMaster in the system I was able to engage in such hyperbole as “Have you ever heard vinyl sound so clean?” and “It’s like I upgraded my system all at once!”
Noise reduction devices, as I’ve learned, have a cumulative effect. I often say “the more the merrier” with grounding hubs and isolation platforms and power conditioners and network switches because I haven’t yet reached the point where I’ve felt things couldn’t possibly get any quieter. Then I try something new, and I hear an even more profound lowering of the noise floor and I know there will always be room for improvement. The GigaWatt PowerMaster, however, convinced me that I could remove most of those other devices from my system and the results would be remarkably similar. That’s a broad claim to make, except I can back it up by saying I did remove all of noise reduction devices from my system except for the PowerMaster, and I still felt I had heard the single most effective product for power management I’ve used. Highly recommended.”
Full review can be found here
