First off, I've owned a number of power conditioners over the years and have never been all that impressed, so you could say that I was a power conditioner skeptic. I hate to admit it, but I used to chuckle at glowing power conditioner reviews in the past. Now I am the proud owner of a new Bryston BIT.
Every conditioner I have purchased has always been with the intent of protecting our electronics and adding more outlets without messing the sound quality up. More often than not the conditioners harmed the sound in one way or another and certainly never improved everything I was hearing.
Turns out that the last conditioner I tried bleached the timbre. It was surprisingly hard to tell how much the sound was affected with no easy direct comparison, but I knew the timbre just didn't sound right. After going through way too many interconnects, speaker cables, wall treatments, and speaker placements, I was really at a loss. In desperation I finally started plugging things directly into the wall outlet to see if that would help. Well simply plugging my preamp into the wall outlet improved the timbre noticeably. On the bright side, that conditioner did give me what I thought was a very black background. In fact, a fellow AudioCircle member visited last year and the first thing he mentioned was how dark the background was.
I ended up calling James Tanner and mentioned my power conditioner/wall outlet timbre problem to him and he recommended trying a BIT. Interestingly James never promised any large improvements in sound quality - but he said there may possibly be some minor improvements. He did tell me that the BIT would protect my gear for years and wouldn't harm the sound at all. Sounded like the BIT was perfect for my setup, but I was still hesitant - the BIT costs at least twice as much as any of my previous power conditioners.
The BIT arrived and after maneuvering it into my equipment rack (not easy, since it is as heavy as my amp) I decided that I might as well plug everything (including my 14B SST2 amp) into the BIT and see if I could hear a difference. I wasn't expecting much and assumed that the BIT would need some break in time before I would be able to hear any minor changes.
Well, I was flat out stunned. James had completely undersold the BIT and I immediately notice that the music was smoother, and more "real" sounding than I have ever heard with my setup. By smoother I don't mean blurred or a loss of detail - there was actually more detail now. I'm not sure how to describe the smoothness I was hearing other than to say that the music seemed more effortless. Everything on the soundstage was more clearly defined and it was easier than ever to follow individual instruments or singers throughout a song. I finally am able to hear what people have described as "the back of the soundstage" and I can only attribute that to having a blacker background than I was used to. Instrument timbre is much better - shockingly so. I can't think of any aspect of the sound that hasn't been improved by the BIT.
To top it off, the Bryston BIT also should do a much better job at protecting our electronics. I couldn't be more thrilled with the BIT.
Well done Bryston/Torus and thank you James!
-Greg
