what does a power conditioner really do?

It all has to do with the quality of the AC coming into your house from the power grid. Depending on where you live, the power can be dirty, i.e., in a large city, unstable, prone to lightning strikes, or the best case scenario, a stable signal from the power company.

chayro gave good explanations of the different types of conditioner or reconditioner that would be needed.
When power is stable and does not need to be regenerated (active power conditioner), a passive conditioner can provide benefit. But, you get what you pay for.
A good passive's purpose is to lower the noise floor of the AC coming in thru your wall receptacle. It also removes RFI/EMI. The result is more detail, better separation of instruments, basically better signal to noise ratio.

The problem with power conditioners is to find one that does not restrict the dynamics of your components. Most units will state "Non-Current Limiting," which means they will let the signal flow unrestricted and not colour the sound. This may be true of low-current components, such as CDPs, DAC, preamps, but IMO, all passives affect the sonics of amplifiers.
Most members using conditioning will only have low-draw components plugged into the device and the amp plugged directly into the wall or a very high-end balanced power device.

A good passive PC can range from about $300 to $700, while active units can cost into the thousands.

I do not use a power conditioner. I use the original Naim Wiremold power strip only for my sources, CD, DVD, DAC, Preamp. I keep my Levinson amp plugged straight into the wall outlet. I have mounted the Wiremold on a block of Maple wood to keep it off of the carpet. It contains no fuse, not light and no off/on switch. 9 high quality outlets, non current limiting.

You can Google Stereophile.com and read a recent review of the newly upgraded products being offered by AV Options.com. Cryogenic treatment options as well.

www.avoptions.com › service › pricing

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cousinbillyl117 posts05-15-2016 9:04pm

I am in Ontario, Canada. Ontario Hydro has installed smart meters. To maximize their profits, they feed us 125V. Big problem.

I can assure that it's either not big problem or not problem at all.

I had the same question. Asked a friend who is a nuclear, electrical and sound engineer who designs and builds (and sells) his own speaker, interconnect cables and AC power cables.
He intsalled an Audio Magic pulse gen ZX within my Amp to clean emi/rfi and had me buy a Furutech GTX-D duplex receptacle for my wall (look 'em up). Both were jaw dropping improvement. Cleaner signal, blackest background, greater imaging and wider, deeper, higher sound stage. The only other time I experienced this degree of improvement was the first time I spent a few grand on really good cables (his of course).. Would have taken a $20,000 amp AND speaker ugrade to notice as big a difference. Those 2 items above would set you back around $800.. Oh, I should mention I didn't really think I needed anything and liked my sound fine at the time. So.....

Ask Ralph Karsten of atma-sphere on what he recommends with his monster power amps. He will suggest an industrial power conditioner which was often used by military, laboratories, hospitals etc etc other across the planet. It’s called the elgar the unit is setup as 240 v input 117v output and connects to the breaker box.

These units are all discontinued. It has 3000va continuous output. And 15000va peak. It can run 2 Atmasphere MA-2 power amps and still have juice for all your dac and preamps. It has the fastest response time on the planet.

The unit is approx 200lbs.

I think they sell for 4000.00 dollars fully reconditioned.