Cleaning up dirty power...What's your flavor?

Kingrex said:
I don't so much like filters on my gear. What I have been considering is a filter on the line that feeds my refrigerator. When that is running I can hear it through my amps and speakers. I could possibly look at replacing the run cap in the reefer, but I've wondered why audio companies don't design devices to clean up pollutants in your house.
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Kingrex: Have someone look at your main circuit breaker panel; this sounds like your refrigerator (and possibly other noisy devices like heating/air conditioning), etc...may well be on the same side ("leg") of your circuit breaker box as the circuit(s) for your audio system. Furthermore, they may be 'before' the circuits for your audio system in the order of supply from main input outward. If this is the case, have someone shut down the circuit break on the home and re-shuffle the order of circuits such that all noisy devices are on the opposite leg and that your system circuits are as close to or at the 1st outputs from the box after the main input. The electrician may need to do some rewiring in the box and also some simple math to balance the load on both legs of your panel to keep things within specs.
 
SC, Could you hear the cad weld. I heard the weld is actually inserting a bunch of residual material between the wire and rod. I was going to nut mine with a liberal coat of deox and shrink wrap a cover over the connection.
 
SC, I'm a master electrician. I have tried both legs as well as confirming the refer is not on the audio leg. I have measured my house with a power logic 7550 and Fluke 199C. It's not that bad. I think I see RF noise. Even with scopes they just tell you you have some noise or you see some sine wave distortion. From there it's hard to determine what is making the noise or at what freq its at. It's not like they say your dimmer is doing it, or a computer SMPS or the University of Washintons VFD drives in the parking garage 1 mile away. That's the hard part of dirty power.
I was real close to putting a 7kva equitech transformer in my basement. I never did as the 2.4 Kva balanced transformer I had was making the front end gear sound odd and the amps had a touch of veil. FWIW, I did have that transformer powering a CJ amp and it did its job with minimal down side. Took serious listening to hear it, but it shut down very loud transformer hum so it stayed. It does not work with either of my current amps. My Isoteck Syncro worked great on my Rega Osiris. That was its sweet spot.

I still have amp hum. Reading the Pure Power website tech page makes me think I have RF noise. 2 week from now when I put my new subpanel in, I will use steel pipe for feeds and shield the power cables. Hopefully that cuts the noise without compressing the sound. Sometime shielding does odd things. I will be taking pictures and provide a write up of the project and results. Oddly, if it does not do much, that will bode well for the ofc cord I have run from my panel directly into a power distribution strip I built. Sonically that design dropped the noise floor dramatically. That is in comparison to #10 thhn in steel or PVC pipe. My guess is 1, ofc wire is better. 2 cord may damp vibration. 3 the power strip I built is of 1/2" Corian and a CD acrylic. That may be damping vibration too.
 
Kingrex said:
SC, Could you hear the cad weld. I heard the weld is actually inserting a bunch of residual material between the wire and rod. I was going to nut mine with a liberal coat of deox and shrink wrap a cover over the connection.
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Kingrex, I was not able to hear the CADWELD's effect separately as I had the 2 large-diameter solid grounds rods put in and the CADWELD all applied on the same day along with the large gauge ground wire lead to the main house power input point. I wish I would have thought about doing it in stages but my electrician had a hell of a time putting those rods into SC red clay that deep and probably would have 'sputtered' more loudly than he already was if I asked him to come back! It was not an easy project due to the soil composition here. The person who advised the CADWELD and his son from RI were both dedicated audio-nuts and master electricians; they never mentioned any residual material between the wire road. There may be for all I know but the end result sounded great in the system and there were noticeably blacker backgrounds overall with only that change. Stage 2 was the installation of the sub-panel and change of main house-panel to 2 panels that both had copper busbars and at that time also installing the EP2050 and 2750 devices into the main house panel and sub-panel (the 2750s, the 2050 only went on the main panel). That was also a big jump and as I mentioned the video playback for HDTV, Bluray and UHD4K-upscaled DVD was noticeably better from that step.

Your ideal to coat the ground rod and wire with deox and then shrink wrap sounds like it could provide the same net-effect of sealing the ground wire to the rod. I assume you would use regular clamps for this; as long as you are not dealing with temperature and moisture extremes the way we do here, it should work quite well.
 
Kingrex said:
SC, I'm a master electrician. I have tried both legs as well as confirming the refer is not on the audio leg. I have measured my house with a power logic 7550 and Fluke 199C. It's not that bad. I think I see RF noise. Even with scopes they just tell you you have some noise or you see some sine wave distortion. From there it's hard to determine what is making the noise or at what freq its at. It's not like they say your dimmer is doing it, or a computer SMPS or the University of Washington's VFD drives in the parking garage 1 mile away. That's the hard part of dirty power.
I was real close to putting a 7kva equitech transformer in my basement. I never did as the 2.4 Kva balanced transformer I had was making the front end gear sound odd and the amps had a touch of veil. FWIW, I did have that transformer powering a CJ amp and it did its job with minimal down side. Took serious listening to hear it, but it shut down very loud transformer hum so it stayed. It does not work with either of my current amps. My Isoteck Syncro worked great on my Rega Osiris. That was its sweet spot.

I still have amp hum. Reading the Pure Power website tech page makes me think I have RF noise. 2 week from now when I put my new subpanel in, I will use steel pipe for feeds and shield the power cables. Hopefully that cuts the noise without compressing the sound. Sometime shielding does odd things. I will be taking pictures and provide a write up of the project and results. Oddly, if it does not do much, that will bode well for the ofc cord I have run from my panel directly into a power distribution strip I built. Sonically that design dropped the noise floor dramatically. That is in comparison to #10 thhn in steel or PVC pipe. My guess is 1, ofc wire is better. 2 cord may damp vibration. 3 the power strip I built is of 1/2" Corian and a CD acrylic. That may be damping vibration too.
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Kingrex,...I am definitely not a master electrician; all I've learned has been courtesy of some very knowledgeable people so I try to share what I've learned as it just seems to work very well for me in each install that I've done with their advice. The amp hum problem you have sounds like a tricky one to track down; have your ruled out transformer hum from some bits of DC on the line or a subtle ground potential difference on one outlet or the other? I had that once where I had a dedicated circuit run with MCLite (sp?) metal flex conduit with 2 J-boxes in the circuit (bad idea) to split out to multiple duplex outlets; seemed like a great idea and was recommended by the electrician I used 3 houses and many years ago but turned out to be an absolute 'bear' to track down subtle differences with component hum from one outlet and not the others all ultimately attributed to subtle ground potential differences in the outlets connected to one side of a J-box and not the other, i.e. the J-box itself was the issue and how it was applied plus the metal conduit. Nasty problems to say the least....

Purepower website: Is this the one out of Canada? Are you using a Purepower 2000+ or 3000+ by any chance? I frankly abandoned PP's units after the non-plus generation (had a PP2000 that I really liked) as the times I trialed a 3000+ and a 2000+ unit in my system, I heard alot of noise and buzzing in my speakers. PP blamed my system but they would never explain why the same system with no PP unit at all or with my older PP 2000 non-plus unit did not exhibit the problem minutes before or minutes after simply removing the + unit they had sent.

RF noise: If it is, the shielding approach should help you....are you using shielded interconnects and other things today? RCA or XLR? If you want to have a longer conversation, feel free to drop me a PM with a phone# or email and we can talk. I'm no expert but have fought many battles with noise, hum, etc...over the years, happy to help if I can.
 
Thanks SC. I don't think you can ever rule out a ground loop. Those buggers are annoying. I have feed my rack many ways and gone through quite a few stereo and monobock amps. I can't get rid of the hum. Even with the inputs shorted I get humming. I am trying a subpanel to improve isolation and separate grounding. I'm hoping that helps. Then comes the new power feed.

I am considering the EP ground device. I have an SPD. I think cleaning the ground is a good idea.
 
Still have a PS Audio PPP, but only using it for my TV and TV Tuner (only connected to my Hifi system by optical cable), incoming %THD is 0.8 to 1.8 depending time off day.

For my Hifi system I am using an Ansuz Mainz 8 D2 distributor which has made my system (with Ansuz Power cords on a dedicated power line) very quiet, increased dynamics/resolution, larger soundstage and more refined.

Also easier now to tell the difference when I change equipment or cables in the system.
 
Kingrex said:
Thanks SC. I don't think you can ever rule out a ground loop. Those buggers are annoying. I have feed my rack many ways and gone through quite a few stereo and monobock amps. I can't get rid of the hum. Even with the inputs shorted I get humming. I am trying a subpanel to improve isolation and separate grounding. I'm hoping that helps. Then comes the new power feed.

I am considering the EP ground device. I have an SPD. I think cleaning the ground is a good idea.
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Best of luck,...hope you get to the root of the problem ASAP!
 
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Annata, please read as much of these articles as you can. Never take any as THE WORD. They will constantly contradict each other. Over time you will have to develop your own beliefs.
 
Kingrex said:
Annata, please read as much of these articles as you can. Never take any as THE WORD. They will constantly contradict each other. Over time you will have to develop your own beliefs.
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+1 on this....I've read the article shared in this thread from Annatta and many others. If they were all true, power cords and so many other things would not make a difference. It would all be up to the mains power quality and the quality of the designs of the components themselves.
 
Technical articles on electricity/audio can be particularly baffling to liberal arts educated tech-illiterate types like me. It's almost as if one has to choose someone you trust (both for their technical competence and their trustworthiness) and try their path-- and then go to the trouble to methodically do a listening test (which is not always easy to do effectively).

I've been using a PS Audio P12 for awhile. I still haven't conclusively determined if it improves my sound in the way their marketing verbiage describes.

This article shared by Annata essentially says, if I understand, that it's absurd to expect sine wave regeneration to have any audible improvement, because once the Regenerator regenerates the AC sine wave, it will then return to it's previous compromised form when it is converted to DC.

Do I have that right?
 
I believe he did say that which goes against my anecdotical evidence that every single piece of anything you put in the power path makes a sound.

The only device that has not made a sound is the Akiko Corelli which I believe is also a Shunyata Typhoon. You don't plug into it, it plugs into your power strip and supposedly absorbes high frequency noise.

I have a belief, do not use anything unless you need it to fix a problem. Others love any Audioquest, shunyata etc they can afford. As a point to note. In the most recent February TAS and the past issue where Herb Reichel wrote about the Audioquest Niagara 1000. Please note they both said they were comparing it against a Home Depot power strip. If you are using as such, immediately throw it away. That is your biggest hindrance to good sound via anything connected to it.

I also believe power conditioners are very system dependent. IMO, ss amps accept power conditioners better than tube.

IMO, the only thing you should absolutely do is run dedicated feeds to your equipment rack with the best wire you can afford. Think OFC 10 awg. Avoid using receptacles with your main power feed (This is not NEC but works great). Go right from the feed into the best quality power strip you can afford. Ground your panel as best you can. Use a sub panel with suplimental ground of copper rods and #1 copper wire from panel to rod. Deox the connection and shrink wrap the connection. You want to eliminate oxidation. Always use the same phase for every circuit in your audio, video system.

I personally double the size of my grounds by paralleling a military spec silver coated #10 conductor alongside the #10 cu conductor in my power feed.

I have seen people double the neutral too. Say a #10 for the hot and #8 for the neutral and #8 for the ground.

Don't get me started on shielding. That's just a pissing match.
 
Totally agree on system dependent. It’s only recently that I have started to use cords. The AQ line has transformed my system, but it may not to much for others. This is why I will only buy if I can return.
 
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