Hi
I have posted quite a bit about the need for clean power in any serious stereo systems. While I would not rate it as important as Room Treatment, its importance ranks high in getting the best out of any system, modest or superlative.
Your house is wired to the commercial grid. There is a line that goes from your house to the pole or something in the street a pole or something else. Your house is connected IN PARALLEL with other house in the neighborhood in most instance, but it is in most cases (unless you generate you own power) connected in parallel with some other houses. In these houses there are sources of noise, electrical noise, electrical disturbances that can be easily seen on an oscilloscope, your house sees these disturbances.
The disturbances are of two basic natures:
Those that affect the Quantity of the power available to your house
Those that affect the Quality of the power available to your house.
On the quantity side, it is relatively well covered in most American neighborhoods. Most American houses or dwelling have a serious amount of power available to them on an (almost) continuous basis. You turn on your AC, an electrical oven, while watching TV, listening to music, all lights on in the house and ironing a shirt with no problem in most American dwellings… Not a thought about that... Yet an electrical oven consumes easily 3 to 5 KW of power, A Water heater the same and a Central AC unit... well... the same!! So in the USA the issue of Quantity is dealt with.
Quality in the USA or elsewhere in not as understood. You all have seen those long electrical lines that characterizes any inhabited areas, long lines that are strewn across the USA or elsewhere... These carry the power from the power plants to the houses through a complicated maze of wires. The same power plants are connected to industrial and commercial facilities. In these facilities there are equipments that produce a lot of electrical disturbances... Some actually send back unsolicited power to the power plants (I know it is an oversimplification but the concept of counter-EMF is actually that ...). A big electric motor running an elevator sends back a lot of electrical noise back to the power lines and more. And these noises can be seen and felt. They affect the quality of what electrical power you get in your house but also affect its quantity as well. IOW these noises can combine in a random fashion to have LESS electricity in your house. But we are talking about quality here and we will remain on topic.
What your equipment expects to see is a clean sine wave at a set (60 HZ in the USA, 50 in many others) from the power line. What they get is something vaguely resembling a sine and while 60 Hz is the fundamental, lot of harmonics and other frequencies non-harmonically related. You get that from the grid, from the line that connects your house to the commercial system. Before you have done a thing with it or to it. You get NOT a sine but a signal on which rides a lot of noise, which the commercial grid captured, including RFi, EMI, etc. Those long lines strewn across the fields are big antennas too and they catch things, lot of things, none of these wanted in the distribution system or your house …
When you have a dedicated line. All you have done is a breaker dedicated to your system and your system only. Whatever noise is present in your system will be seen at the dedicated line as well. All that you get a little more is some power before the breaker trips up available to you and you only. You are not truly isolated from the noise generated inside or outside your house. You are NOT!! Dedicated Lines DO NOT ISOLATE YOU FROM NOISE INSIDE OR OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE. I had to shout it because there is so much misconception on the subject …It is good to start with dedicated line... You still don’t have clean power to your system and this is a fact …
You must filter the noise coming OUT and that is what some system can do. The ISOTech is one of them and there are others. There are ways to filter noise in an electrical distribution system. One of them is an isolation transformer coupled with 4 wire wiring. A transformer, the bigger the better is a good filter against High Frequency; the bigger they are the better they filter high frequencies. There is also a bit of (for the lack of a better word) Electrical Inertia in a big transformer they tend to store energy and thus can provide a small amount of electrical stabilization, same as what you observe in big capacitor but not as much storage … Another is Balanced electrical system which work very well to remove the noise, Equates being a prime example. These are good at removing noise from the electricity provided by the commercial grid.
The absolute best is a double conversion UPS one that First transform the AC to DC, charges a battery with the DC uses the power room the battery to generate its OWN electricity with these of a device called a DC to AC inverter. They have the potential to provide the best AC to any system. I believe there are very few of these devices in the audiophile world... The only one I know of is the PS Audio power plant. In the non-audiophile world there are plenty of solutions... The best known brand in that realm is APC… They make a lot of double conversion UPS and the power coming out of some of them can power ANY size Audiophile system with ease from 2 Watts to 150 KW they have these.. But that will be for another post if there is any interest in the subject. This on is already tool long.. And let's not forget proper grounding ...
Frantz
P.S. I had to learn the issue of power the hard way. When my expensive ISP infrastructure was going down for no apparent reasons. I applied the same principles in my system and have liked the results…