Power Conditioning Good for electronics, hard on the wallet

[Watermonkey 0]

So I get some audio engineering related email since that's what I went to school for (Shoreline Community College, AA/AS 1993) and I ran across this the other day: http://www.purepoweraps.com/

Anomalies like noise, clipped sine waves, and surges are the leading cause of lower life expectancy in electronics of all sorts, high end and Kmart level. Obviously, if you buy all your home electronics from Wallyworld or Kame-a-part, you've got issues that supersede power conditioning, so we won't even go there. For others who might actually buy high-end components or actually have an expensive theater and/or recording studio in their homes (or elsewhere), power conditioning is one of the most important ways of making that sound quality reach its full potential. I'd love to know how a $10M studio cleans its electricity, other than good old fashion AC to DC (rectifiers) with battery backup, back to AC again through HUGE inverters. I bet it'd be nothing to spend $100k on power conditioning alone in a setup like that. I've heard of people taking a drop off the utility, bringing it in to the door, and injecting a transformer right there, before the electricity enters the studio's wiring. They must've done more though because it wouldn't accomplish much except to provide newly transformed voltage to them; they'd still be vulnerable to brownouts, frequency fluctuations, and surges.

The wiring is something to pay attention to also. Copper wire can easily, if not shielded properly, provide just the right pathway to accommodate Radio Frequency interference and without the proper grounding, that interference can carry all the way to the speakers or your recording. (If you're recording, you really need to isolate those mics, by the way. A mic stand can pick up low frequency vibration from air traffic or ground traffic. There are cheaper ways, but Bad Animals studios in Seattle WA actually has several feet of concrete isolating the studio from the walls and the slab the studio sits on is floating on top of a layer of oil which sits sealed upon another slab of concrete. However you do it, that's definitely one way to shield your recording from low frequency interference.) Now the wiring should avoid parallel runs for much distance and it should all consist of top-of-the line heavy gauge construction. Having just one master ground is key because then, you're just working from one reference to drain all the interference to instead of two potentially competing grounds whose voltages may differ, even slightly. In a house, I recommend a copper water pipe that you know to go to the outside world. If you're not sure about its grounding, you can measure its voltage in relation to a known ground. You should detect absolutely no voltage with a good Fluke volt/ohm meter that is sensitive down to .00 volts. To really fully, and obsessively shield your studio, room, or house from RF interference, build it all underground and encase a copper cage around all six walls like a chain link fence and drain the ground to just one point along with all the electrical grounds. If your middle initials aren't N.S.A., you probably can't afford that, so you'll have to expect some amount of interference depending upon your budget, but using a AC/DC/AC method, such as the solution I've linked at the beginning of this article is probably the most cost-effective means of beginning this process.

One way to determine if your sound system is on a clean power supply is (and this works best with self-amplified speakers such as Mackie HR824 professional studio monitors) to simply turn all the electronics on and listen to the speaker. If you turn the volume up to about half and with your ear next to the speaker you don't hear any static, white noise, 60Hz ground loop, or anything at all, you've done a tremendous job of "cleaning" your power and ground system! Congratulations. Questions? I'll try and answer as many as I can.