3 ms·

> Another recollection I just had is that he had a separate electric circuit run to the house(as in a second set of wires coming off the utility pole) so he cou

> Another recollection I just had is that he had a separate electric circuit run to the house(as in a second set of wires coming off the utility pole) so he could properly condition the power feeding his audio gear In my limited experience, "clean power" (I know nil about this so I'm just repeating what I hear) was the most important difference people would "hear". My uncle used to have a Hi-Fi shop and I helped him sometimes. People hearing distortions in their existing setup used to make up for 90% of his customers. In those cases the number one step was to make sure that the power that comes to the system is clean. Being a certified electrician, he used to do his thing and you would almost always hear the "aaah" from the customers the moment you hit play. To me also the difference was generally night and day.

sjwright 8y ago
And yet such impressions conflict with how power supply circuits work and how THD measurement works. Wall power is incredibly noisy and there’s nothing much an electrician can do to change that. If this noise had any meaningful effect on the sound—it doesn’t—you would be able to measure it as a variance in THD. (Now of course that might be less true for some poorly made vinyl/phono level equipment but if you actually cared about audible distortions you wouldn't be listening to the sound of a needle scratching its way across a fragile plastic groove in the first place...)
- egeozcan 8y ago
  Maybe then it was because of the isolation that the audio cables got being away from all the chaos created by the random power cables. I don't know. Most of the time, it was a huge improvement. The next step was to fix/remove anything that caused distortions.
airbreather 8y ago
Would have been way better off with a bunch of car batteries, the internal resistance and cold cranking amps would have pissed on any utility supply regulation and power supply regardless of the capacitors he had.

sjwright 8y ago

And yet such impressions conflict with how power supply circuits work and how THD measurement works. Wall power is incredibly noisy and there’s nothing much an electrician can do to change that. If this noise had any meaningful effect on the sound—it doesn’t—you would be able to measure it as a variance in THD. (Now of course that might be less true for some poorly made vinyl/phono level equipment but if you actually cared about audible distortions you wouldn't be listening to the sound of a needle scratching its way across a fragile plastic groove in the first place...)

egeozcan 8y ago
Maybe then it was because of the isolation that the audio cables got being away from all the chaos created by the random power cables. I don't know. Most of the time, it was a huge improvement. The next step was to fix/remove anything that caused distortions.

airbreather 8y ago

Would have been way better off with a bunch of car batteries, the internal resistance and cold cranking amps would have pissed on any utility supply regulation and power supply regardless of the capacitors he had.