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Recommended Component 2024 – Stereophile
A Revolutionary Power Conditioning Component
AudioQuest's Niagara 5000 12-outlet power conditioner is a revolutionary product that's packed with features and performance, staring with non-sacrificial surge suppression. Non-sacrificial means there's nothing to damage with repeated 6000V/3000A input surge tests, which is the maximum that can survive through a building’s AC electrical panel. It also offers extreme voltage shutdown Voltage; 140VAC will activate the main high-current relay to open within less than 0.25 second, and automatically resets once the incoming power is within a safe range.
The Niagara 5000 also provides common-mode noise dissipation in excess of 30dB from 20kHz to 100MHz, linearized for dynamic (rising) line impedance with frequency (source) and 10 to 50 ohm load, system current dependent. You'll hear and see the difference that the Niagara makes with your AV system components.
The 12-outlet Niagara 5000 features four isolated AC power outlet groups. Four provide High Current/Transient Power Correction, and provide Ultra-Linear Noise Dissipation System Power. Power consumption is typically, less than 0.25 amps at 120VAC input, or with the power correction switched to Standby setting. The input current maximum capacity is 20 amps RMS (total).
"Recommended Component" Honors
Stereophile honored the Niagara 5000 by awarding it the magazine's coveted Recommend Component status for 2024.
According to Stereophile, "KR, who admits to many years of skepticism about the audible advantages claimed for power conditioners, has had a change of heart, evinced by his use of the words love and Niagara in the same sentence: 'love what the Niagaras 5000 and 1000… have done for the sound of my system.'"
"At half the price and less than half the weight of AudioQuest's flagship Niagara 7000, the Niagara 5000 differs from it primarily in lacking the Dielectric-Biased AC isolation transformers on its eight noise-dissipation outlets… Bolstered with some of AudioQuest's NRG Edison AC outlets ($149 each), the Niagara 5000 compelled Kal to write that 'the noise from [my] tweeters was reduced, and the noise from [my] woofers was now completely inaudible.' And there you have it."
The Complex Science of AC Power Delivery
The science of AC power delivery is not a simple one; it demands focus, and the devil is in the details. In fact, the great increase in airborne and AC-line-transmitted radio signals, combined with overtaxed utility lines and the ever-increasing demands from high-definition audio/video components, has rendered our utilities’ AC power a somewhat antiquated technology.
Where Alternating Current (AC) is concerned, we’re relying on a century-old technology created for incandescent lights and electric motors—technology that was certainly never meant to power the sophisticated analog and digital circuits used in today’s 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 very wide range of frequencies.
Further, today’s power amplifiers are being taxed for instantaneous peak-current demand, even when they’re driven at modest volumes. Although we have seen a substantial increase in dynamics from much of our audio software, the loudspeakers we employ to reproduce them are often 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 transformer, regeneration amplifier, 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.
Given that the stakes are so high, all sincere attempts to solve this problem must be applauded.
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 within our community. For years, we have all been witness to the same, seemingly endless audiophile debates: valves versus transistors; analog versus digital; can cables really make a difference?; and on and on. While we, too, can brag about our many unique technologies, we realize that true audio/video optimization is never a matter of any one secret or exotic circuit. When it comes to noise filtering for AC power, many approaches can yield meaningful results. However, these approaches may also impart ringing, current compression, and non-linear distortions that can render the cure worse than the disease!
Patented AC Ground Noise-Dissipation System
The Niagara 5000 features AudioQuest's patented AC Ground Noise-Dissipation System, the widest bandwidth-linearized AC filter in the industry, and our unique passive/active Transient Power Correction Circuit. Boasting an instantaneous current reservoir of over 90 amps peak, the Niagara 5000 is specifically designed for today’s current-starved power amplifiers. Many AC power products featuring “high-current outlets” merely minimize current compression; the Niagara 5000 corrects it.
Though it’s easy to tout a given technology, it’s quite another thing to create a solution that is consistent, holistic, functional, and that honors verifiable science. It’s not enough to reduce AC line noise and its associated distortions at just one octave, thus leaving vulnerable the adjacent octaves and octave partials to noise, resonant peaking, or insufficient noise reduction. Consistency is key. We should never accept superior resolution in one octave, only to suffer from masking effects a half-octave away and ringing artifacts two octaves from there. This is the principal criterion for AudioQuest’s Low-Z Power Noise-Dissipation System.
The Niagara 5000 represents over 20 years of exhaustive research and proven AC power products designed for audiophiles, broadcast engineers, and professional-audio applications. Every conceivable detail has been addressed. In the Niagara 5000, you’ll find optimized radio-frequency lead directionality, capacitor run-in forming technologies developed by Jet Propulsion Laboratories and NASA, and AC inlet and outlet contacts with heavy silver plating over extreme-purity copper, assuring the tightest grip possible.
Clarity, Dimensionality, Frequency Extension
A great system is built from a solid foundation, and that foundation starts with power. With an AudioQuest Niagara 5000, you’ll experience for the first time the clarity, dimensionality, frequency extension, dynamic contrast, and grip your system has always been capable of delivering—if only the power had been right!
Experience the Niagara 5000 and hear firsthand the remarkable results of highly optimized power management: startlingly deep silences, stunning dynamic freedom, outstanding retrieval of ambience cues, and gorgeous delineation of instruments and musicians in space. Once you’ve experienced it, it may seem so elegant, so logical, and so obvious that you find yourself wondering why it hadn’t been done before.
Note: Niagara Noise-Dissipations Systems do not ship with an AC power cable.
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