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Recommended Component 2025 – Stereophile
A Revolutionary New Approach to Power Conditioning
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 turned our utilities' AC power into 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. This is 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.
"Recommended Component" Honors
Stereophile honored the Niagara 7000 by awarding it the magazine's coveted Recommend Component status for 2025.
According to Stereophile, "Inside this attractive 81lb box are circuits comprising AudioQuest's Ultra-Linear Noise-Dissipation technology, six banks of direction-controlled ground-noise dissipation, and AC isolation transformers to which AQ's trademark Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) has been applied. Although MF [Michael Fremer] described the Niagara 7000's outlets as 'the most difficult to use I've ever encountered,' owing to their sheer grip, he was impressed with the Niagara's effectiveness, which he regarded as being on a par with that of his Shunyata Research Hydra Triton v2 and Hydra Typhon distributors. Each had its strengths, MF said, noting that 'the Niagara 7000 better resolved fine detail and threw a deeper, more expansive soundstage.'"
"You May Well Be Seriously Surprised"
"The musical improvements that result from using the Niagara 7000 to drive some or all of your system can be as fundamental as they are significant. It will make your system sound better, but more importantly, it will make it more engaging and more rewarding," reports Roy Gregory, hi-fi+, May 14, 2019. "Listen and you may well be seriously surprised."
"I would no more pull out the floor from beneath my speakers than pull the Niagara 7000 from my wall outlet," raves Dennis Davis, theaudiobeat.com, October 7, 2017.
AV Components Need Better AC
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.
There has to be a better way. AudioQuest leads the way with the Niagara 7000. Experience the Niagara 7000 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.
Redefining the Science of Power Conditioning
AudioQuest's 12-outlet Niagara 7000 redefines the science of power conditioning. The Niagara 7000 uses AudioQuest's patented AC Ground Noise- Dissipation System, the world's first Dielectric-Biased AC Isolation Transformers, and the widest bandwidth-linearized AC filter in the industry. AudioQuest's unique passive/active Transient Power Correction Circuit features an instantaneous current reservoir of over 90 amps peak, specifically designed for today's current-starved power amplifiers. Most AC power products featuring "high-current outlets" merely minimize current compression. The Niagara 7000 corrects it.
A great system is built from a solid foundation, and that foundation starts with power. With an AudioQuest Niagara 7000, 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!
With the Niagara 7000, "I heard far more specificity of image, room ambience, incisive attack, instrumental color, and dynamic peaks," notes Jason Victor Serinus, Stereophile.com, January 11, 2015.
A System That Honors Verifiable Science
Though it's easy to boast, 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.
"Absolutely Delivers What It Claims to Deliver"
"In the world of power management, AudioQuest is a market leader, and the Niagara 7000 is a proven product that absolutely delivers what it claims to deliver," notes Paul Wilson, futureaudiiophile.com, October 7, 2022. "It will protect your audio system and make it sound better. Period. What more can you ask of any power-conditioning product?"
According to Cai Brockman, fidelity-magazine.com, "Once you’ve installed such a top-end device in your audiophile setup at home, you can look into other hi-fi component upgrades at your own leisure — if that’s actually still 'necessary,' that is. You see, the AudioQuest Niagara 7000 also demonstrates one other thing: A lot more untapped sound potential than you’ve thought is always lying dormant in your devices than what you’ve experienced so far."
Over 20 Years of Exhaustive Research
The Niagara 7000 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 7000, 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.
Sophisticated Power Technologies
The Niagara is unique in that it has both passive and active circuits, but it does not rely on any of the conventional circuits or technologies that have been used for AC power for decades. Active regeneration or battery backup seems as if it might be ideal as it's pure DC power (direct current), and that's what our audio and video components use to power their circuits. It's also described to be "off the grid." Unfortunately, to generate the AC power that the components' power supply requires, there is an oscillation circuit that follows the battery or DC circuit and that raises the impedance, as well as limits the majority of noise reduction to the bandwidth of the active circuit/amplifier.
Typical passive power conditioners could potentially reduce far more radio frequency and AC generated line noise, but frequently do not. They can also raise impedance in some designs, and, more often than not, both approaches tend to have non-linear (uneven) noise filtering response. The Niagara Series features linearized noise-dissipation and proprietary circuits that aid power amplifiers rather than limit them.
Transient Power Correction
The Niagara 7000's Transient Power Correction offers an ultra-low Z (Z=impedance) buffered source for any power amplifier's power supply, as well as a current reservoir of over 90 amps peak for AC current transients. This provides the current on demand that a power amplifier requires for dynamic audio transients. The obvious sonic benefit is bass that is tighter, more focused, controlled, and extended.
Dielectric-Biased Symmetrical Power Isolation Transformer
AC isolation transformers are the very best means of dissipating common-mode AC line and radio frequency induced noise from the power that feeds your sensitive source components. Common-mode noise is symmetrical noise (even on both Line and Neutral leads). By employing a balanced or symmetrical transformer, noise is cancelled in the same means as in balanced signal interconnects or microphones. AudioQuest has taken this time-tested technology and greatly extended both its linearity and frequency bandwidth by employing its patent-pending Dielectric Biasing Technology.
High Current/Low-Z Power Banks
The Niagara 7000 boasts 12 outlets. There are two High Current/Low-Z Power banks (labeled "1" and "2") with two AC outlets each. The outlets feature AudioQuest's Transient Power Correction Technology, and are designed to enhance the performance of power amplifiers via the Niagara 7000 circuit's low-impedance transient current reservoir. Power amplifiers, monoblock amplifiers, integrated amplifiers, powered receivers, or powered subwoofers should only be connected to these four outlets. The other eight outlets use AudioQuest's Ultra-Linear Dielectric-Biased Symmetrical Power and are ideal for your other AV components.
Surge Protection Limits
The Niagara Series has automatic voltage shutdown for North American units of 140V (275V for export 220V-240V 50Hz countries). Undervoltage shutdown is not utilized, as undervoltage is not in and of itself what creates a damaged circuit. It is the massive overvoltage that is typically measured after a utility undervoltage brown-out is corrected. The overvoltage is what causes the damage, and the Niagara overvoltage circuit will respond in one quarter of a second, resetting the output when the AC voltage is back into a safe range.
Note: AC Power cord not included.
