#voltage aint been feeding

[audio-luddite]

Getting Wired again.

One longstanding facet of the Audiophile world has been power conditioners and fancy wires from the wall plug to your electronics.  It is both a good thing and bullshit.  That depends on the goodness of your toys and where the goodness is.

I just read a review of an $8000 audiophile power conditioner with several outlets, but strangely no cable to feed it, that is extra.  Holy shit say I.

The power, be it 120v, or 110v or even 240v two phase, that comes into your home is far from noise free.  As the wires on the poles or buried under the street are unshielded they pick up signals from everywhere.  CB Radios, AM commercial radio, Wifi, anything out in the air will sneak in.  A good analogy being your city water supply having lots of nasty things in it you do not want to drink that leak in along the delivery pipes.  I have a filter on my drinking water, but don’t really worry about the rest. A filter of some kind on the wall plug makes sense don’t it? Yes and no.

Noise is there and for gobs of money you can keep it out of your precious electronics.  And there is were I have a complaint.  Your electronics should be able to clear that out internally.  It is actually really easy. But they almost always don’t and force you to use a bad solution. It can help is some ways, but hurt in other ways.

Years ago computers were skating on thin ice electronically and a stray RF EM signal could actually crash a server.  Power conditioners were invented for that actually.  They worked and were protection for your precious data.  These devices took several forms.  One of the best type was a transformer that had the same input and output voltage but acted as a very strong filter of any frequency above about 100 hz.  I had those on my servers.  The next type were surge protectors and basic low pass Pi filters, passive, simple, and reliable. Most homes computers had those too.

It took almost no time for geeks with computers to try these out on their sound systems and they heard improvements.  Without noise or with less noise things get quieter. What’s not to like?  Actually quite a bit.

 A power cord costing hundred even thousands of dollars connecting a wall plug to your toys is stupid.  The line to the plug is probably  unsheilded 12 Ga solid wire three conductor. Fancy BX cable is cased in metal, but that was not to stop RF, but to protect it from nails being driven into it. The wire is connected to a breaker box with a plated metal screw holding down a loop and a similar loop and screw at the plug end.  That line is 30 to 50 feet long. The last 6 feet of cryogenically treated pure silver plated whatever is NOT going to make a difference worth money.  You can make real differences inside your box.

It is really easy to add filters to an audio power supply.  Actually they are there already in the form of banks of capacitors, inductors and/or regulators.  My preamp claims that its regulated power supply is equal to a 1 farad capacitor bank. That is a freaking lot of stored power if it is capacitance.  Noise on the power line should simply never get past the power supply.  It has to get past some impressive devices to get into the sound. If they need improvement well look there first!

My power amp has big electrolytic power capacitors inside it.Those are double the factory size. They will pass some noise as electrolytic caps are not that “fast”.  So those are bridged by smaller film caps that will short out any RF noise to ground.  The whole thing is in a metal box to keep out RF in the air.  It is damn quiet before I added even more capacitors in an outboard bank for current surge.  Fancy conditioners and wires aint going to make that better.

Another thing that power conditioners can do is they add resistance to the incoming power.  A big sudden surge demand of a orchestral crescendo will drop the voltage if the line cannot pull the amps from the wall with this thing in the way.  Those transformers worked great for computer servers, but those machines run at effectively constant power.  Stereos do not.

Fix it inside the box say I.

I guess the summary of my thoughts is that if you try one of these things and it helps you should have bought better electronics. More specifically electronics with better power supplies.