AudioQuest Niagara 1000 Owner's Manual

Page of 27
2
created for incandescent lights and electric motors—technology that was certainly 
never meant to power the sophisticated analog and digital circuits used in 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 
wide range of frequencies. 
Further, today’s power amplifiers and receivers are being taxed for instantaneous peak-
current demand, even when they’re driven at modest volumes. Although we have seen 
a substantial increase in both dynamics and bass content from our audio software, the 
loudspeakers we employ to reproduce them are 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 transformers, regeneration 
amplifiers, 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.
All sincere attempts to solve this problem must be applauded since 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