Does a solar power home inverter negatively affect the sound of audio systems?


Michael Fremer’s wrote an interesting Stereophile article regarding the detrimental affect of his gas generator inverter on the sound of his audio system.  Does anyone have experience with a solar power inverter and how it affected the audio system sound.

I think a lot of Mr. Fremer’s problems were related to the electrical ground in his older house. I have a house that was built in 1995 so grounding issues may not be an issue.

dtyoshih

I assume these inverters create emi/rfi, in which case they affect whole house power quality. My own experience of using portable lithium ion battery supply to power certain components exposes flavoring, assume the inverter causing this. 

 

I do seem to recall a thread somewhere here where someone provided link to audiophile spec portable battery supply, inverter used boutique parts to suppress  self generated noise.

I think the devil will be in the details here. A typical gas generator likely has a poor inverter to generate the 110v or 220v output. I am always wary of connecting  electronics with circuit board directly to them for this reason. 
 

I have a relatively new construction solar home which has a large 48v DC battery bank feed by solar panels. I feed that to a large whole house inverter to produce 110v AC to run nearly everything. I have done no scientific testing but the system is dead quiet and no hum. 
 

 

I have not noticed a problem with noise since I put our solar system in almost 7 years ago. No buzzing or humming at all. I have battery backup, but still connected to the grid also. Using Enphase micro-inverters, one for each panel to maximize efficiency.

I recently added small 240 aH 12V battery back-up power system to our home. I haven’t tested it on my sound system yet, but did pose the question on an audio forum about how well battery systems tend to work with an audio system. The general consensus was that if the equipment wasn’t originally designed to run on batteries, then battery power is typically bad for sound quality, though they do work.

It really is all up to the quality of the inverter. A good sine wave inverter with well designed batteries and charger can produce a less noisy and more stable power than  many utilities. 

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