SHUNYATA - HYDRA TRITON POWER CONDITIONER

Shunyata's State-of-the-Art Reference AC Conditioner

100% Designed and Built in the U.S.A. - The Triton Will Give Your Components the Power to Perform at Their Best!

The Absolute Sound 2011 Product of the Year Award Winner!

The best power conditioner Shunyata has ever unleashed, the Triton delivers a level of performance a world beyond anything else on the market. Every single element within the Triton has been tested, measured and carefully auditioned to ensure the highest possible level of performance. Substantially more efficient at delivering power than previous designs, Shunyata has eliminated every power bottleneck, every impedance altering connection, every phase shifting part and created a new benchmark for power conditioning to which the rest of the market will be held.

"The improvements in transparency, spatiality, and resolution of low-level detail were obvious, as were the greater grace and cleanness (but not “filteriness”) of the transients. Most ridiculous, though, was that it all sounded louder."
-- Michael Fremer, Stereophile, Jan. 2012

Not a company to release new models without substantial performance improvements, the Triton is perhaps the finest example of Shunyata's dedication to the "less is more" philosophy. A complete reworking from the ground up, only a few components from previous generation products have been retained. Triton receives an entirely new active filter design, a new and much more powerful passive filter, an extremely efficient buss structure, new internal wiring, new chassis, new feet, even new fasteners and screws. The only parts that were retained are the two parts to which no further improvement was necessary; the Carling breaker and the SR-Z1 outlets. Like all Shunyata products, the Triton is 100% Music Direct guaranteed. But we're not worried about getting it back. You'll never it out of your system!

Cold out of the box, the Triton offers stunning performance; deep soundstaging with excellent resolution, tonal balance is rich and greatly textured, with a superbly smooth character. The level of coherency is absolutely breathtaking, every instrument and every voice sounds complete and fleshed out, no spectrum is spotlit, the music flows and yet each individual element is easily discerned. The biggest shock comes after about an hour of listening, when the first glimmers of what the Triton is capable of begins to finally appear. Literally from one recording to the next, dynamic range expands dramatically, the walls of the hall begins to move backward and upward and the physicality of the performers takes on a whole new dimension. For the next two weeks, as all the elements in the Triton begin to break-in, almost daily improvements in soundstaging, macro and micro dynamics, tonal balance and overall resolution are revealed. A fully burned-in Triton is an extremely addictive sonic experience; every recording sounds fresh and new, the beginning of every song a heart pounding event and the end of every song a sorrowful affair. For those contemplating using a Triton in a home theater, video through the Triton is absolutely stunning! This level of improvement of both audio and video with a single component is a veritable double-play!

History 
For over a decade, Shunyata conditioners have graced the world's best systems, with substantial and unabashed acclaim from critics, industry professionals and music lovers. Both Talos and Triton deliver a broad array of new technologies that are absolutely unprecedented in the audio industry. Although these concepts are groundbreaking and revolutionary, the underlying premises having been tested and refined over 10 years. In 1999, Shunyata unleashed the original Hydra, turning the entire audio world on its head and garnering dozens of accolades in the process. Since then, Shunyata’s Hydras have dominated the power conditioning market with an unbeatable combination of outstanding sound quality, staggering dynamic range and unprecedented transparency and tonal accuracy. This new batch of power conditioners takes this unparalleled legacy to an entirely new level.

Caps & Coils
A typical power supply generates noise at various frequencies. A typical power conditioner uses a combination of capacitors or inductors in an array to attempt to minimize noise. This is like using a chainsaw for brain surgery, a clumsy brute force approach which has damaging and unintended side effects. Capacitors, all of them, regardless of type, grade, material or date of manufacture have a resonant point. In other words, at certain frequencies, the capacitor starts to vibrate or ring. This can be heard in recordings with sharp pitch signatures, such as a bell or a piano, where the capacitor ringing appears as a pinging echo which follows the original event. Ringing can even change the timbre and tone of the system. Some manufacturers use inductors (coils) or ferrite elements to dull the resonance of the capacitors, but this further complicates matters by masking the problem, rather than solving it. Shunyata’s MPDA solution is more elegant and effective.

Multi-Phasic Differential Array (MPDA)
MPDA is an array of micro-filters, each element targets a very specific noise component. Each element acts like a notch filter, eliminating very specific frequencies of noise, without affecting the broad spectrum, the technical term is “High Q, Narrow Bandwidth Filter”. Using Surface Mount Technology, Shunyata is able to place 30 of these high-powered elements onto a circuit board smaller than a stick of gum, virtually eliminating noise and without interfering with the conditioner’s massive current delivery. Most importantly, MPDA eliminates the use of capacitors and inductors.

Noise Isolation Chambers (NIC)
The most visible and striking features inside the Triton are the NICs, three massive cylindrical chambers bolted to the center of the chassis, which deliver an enormous step forward in power-line noise elimination. NICs filter out noise in the megahertz and gigahertz range without slowing down AC current delivery. Made from pure copper, a single wire enters and comes out of each tube, one each for hot, neutral and ground, one wire per cylinder. Each tube is filled with Shunyata’s patented ZrCa-2000 compound, a proprietary material whose unique molecular structure literally devours noise. Shunyata previoiusly used this compound on both the Hydra 8 and the V-Ray, but the new NICs are vastly more powerful as they encapsulate each wire, ensuring ideal coverage and maximum contact area.

Zero Point Power Distribution System (ZP-PDS)
Shunyata has always taken their conductive metals seriously, carefully auditioning and testing every conductive element in the chain to ensure proper signal integrity and durability. Shunyata now uses exclusively high-copper content brass alloy for the conductive chain; every screw, buss bar, fastener, custom termination and end cap. Although other metals might have higher conductivity, each requires some form of electro-plating to keep it from oxidizing or wearing. Plating materials like gold, silver and rhodium each have their own sound, coloring and distorting the signal. Brass is durable, highly conductive and most importantly doesn’t need to be plated for corrosion resistance, eliminating potential sonic character changes. Using a single metal through the entire buss system also has substantial electrical benefits, greatly reducing resistance and lowering the impedance to negligible levels, thus improving conductivity and allowing power to flow freely.

VTX Wire Geometry
Long known for ultra-complex wire geometries which measurably improve conductivity and desirable characteristics, Shunyata has developed a new geometry specifically for use inside this new series of conditioners that greatly reduces the so-called “skin-effect”. Skin-effect is a distortion caused by differing speeds of conductivity between the center of the conductor (where the bass travels) and the outer part or skin of the conductor where the midrange and treble travel. Skin-effect plagues both stranded and solid core wire, causing smearing, timing and phase errors, in some cases even changes in tonal balance. The ideal conductor is a hollow tube, but this is wildly impractical in the real world, so using DTCD analysis, Shunyata created a new type of wire geometry which is a “virtual tube” greatly reducing skin effect and improving conductivity. 

Stereophile (PDF, 769 KB)