After auditioning the Equi=Tech R1.5 in my system many years ago, I realized that I couldn't live w/o it. I installed a dedicated line with a separate ground, and after purchasing an R1.5, I had a tech do extensive modifications to it.Everything plugs into it. It's certainly the foundation of my system.

Power Conditioning: Shunyata Hydra-2 (power amp); Hydra-6 (front-end); Two custom-installed, 20-amp, isolated/dedicated circuits with hospital-grade outlets in the listening room, along with an Eaton/Cutler-Hammer TVSS (transient voltage surge suppressor) installed at my home's electrical loadcenter. Also, my electrician rearranged the circuits on my home's loadcenter such that electrically noisy appliances (ie, those with electric motors) reside on one leg, while the audio room's two circuits reside on the less noise-prone leg.

Power Cables: Shunyata PowerSnakes- Copperhead(x4) and Diamondback(x1).

There is more nonsense and lack of knowledge in this area than any other part of home audio!

1) The power supply in any piece of well-designed equipment will do a virtually perfect job of filtering out any noise from appliances in the home, except RF noise generated by power-tool motors, nearby tranmitters, or the like. Note that I said well-designed; this does not include $300 receivers, cheap CD players and the like.

2) Bad electrical connections in the system are sometimes a culprit in spreading RF to the wiring from many sources, especially fluorescent lighting. Tighten all of the screws in receptacles, but especially the screws where the hot wires are secured to the circuit breakers and the grounds are screwed to the ground busses; these ALWAYS loosen over time due to expansion and contraction compressing the copper wire.

3) A LOT of the RF in your electrical system can be eliminated by simply taking the receptacles out of the wall and installing a 0.1 microfarad capacitor from the hot terminal to the ground terminal on each one; they must have a 600 volt rating.

4) The primary noise source in most homes is fluorescent lighting; as desirable as it is from an energy efficiency standpoint, it produces HUGE amounts of rf garbage which can be picked up by both the power system and by unbalanced (RCA) interconnects between components.

5) Putting a .001 microfarad 100 volt capacitor across every RCA jack on your preamp inputs and outputs can eliminate a lot of RF problems and really clean up a system.

6) expensive power conditioners are a band-aid; they indirectly help with problems that are better and more cheaply solved as described above. The only thing they are really all that good for is regulating the line voltage (but 98% of us do not have line voltage below 110V, so this is a non-issue). If a conditioner makes your system sound better, you have problems that you are partially covering up, but NOT properly eliminating.

I have been using the Balanced Power Technologies BPT-3.5 Signature to great effect. Rather than rewrite how thoroughly it transformed my system's sound and my perception of various components' strengths and weaknesses, let me link you to such messages I and others have already written:

General Asylum - BPT 3.5 Signature Break-in? - jz, January 26, 2004 at 06:39:05
General Asylum - When is a change clearly an improvement?
General Asylum - I've been testing the BP-3.5, & can confirm what was written on 6moons.... - Jim Stoneburner
6moons audio reviews: BPT BP-3.5 Signature
Head-Fi - First impressions of BP-3.5

One thing about this unit that makes it a good value: It can run my power hungry tube amps as well as the rest of the system. This makes a big improvement.

By the way, even excellent engineers know the limitations of "well-designed" power supplies. This kind of black and white thinking is the same that gave us "perfect sound forever".