Redkiwi, thank you for your post. I quite agree that the only true test of whether something has improved your system or not, is your EARS. I have also have done some things with my system that some may consider excessive. I am lucky enough to have the room that I listen in, fairly close to my electric meter and circuit breaker box. I installed a dedicated outlet for my system and ran a pair of #10 wires to my breaker box (hot and neutral only) and a single, very large piece of wire braid directly to the ground rod that sits next to my electric meter. I did not want to depend on the ground system in my house. I float each piece in my system and tie all of the chassis grounds to the ground braid at a single point. I bought some Litz wire on Ebay and made my own power cord to float the equipment. While I really can't say I have improved the quality of sound in my system, I can tell you that I can't hear the ham radio operator next door talking through my system anymore. I was fortunate enough to get my grubby hands on some high quality #6 wire at work and use it between my Audio Research Classic 60 and Theil CS 3.6's, but I did purchase some MIT interconnects to go between my Oracle and preamp (Yeah, I am still a record fan). It all sounds great to me and I am happy :-)
The fallacy of ac treatment
I see a lot of threads related to managing and tweaking the ac powerout end of electronic systems. Much has been said about dedicated wiring, termination and even the right kind of extension cords to use. I work for an electric utility; and that's the extent of my credibilty here. The majority of you will no doubt be far more erudite wrt music hardware. Just a thought, though: domestic ac distribution goes thus: power station-step up-city-step down-subdivision-final step down. As far as the utility is concerned, you and all your neigbours are collectively the load for the step down tranformer. Any inductance/capacitance created by your neigbour running motors/tubelights, etc is felt by the lot of you. Additionally, the voltage frequency will almost always move around a tolerance from 50hz as the whole country turns on the air, off the lights - changes all the time as peaker plants ramp up etc. Nothing can change that- the frequency of the grid supplying your city is the frequency in the mains at your house. So what's my point? Well only that how much difference can the last 10 feet of cabling, etc make when the other hundreds of miles are outside of your control? And more importantly, frequency is one of the most imp parameters for measuring electricity quality (your expensive hand-coiled toroids are entirely subject to the f in the primaries) and nothing other than running an f generator can shield you from that. Methinks all the improvements you see from ac cord treatments are pyschosomatic. But that's cool.
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- 68 posts total
- 68 posts total