How noisy is my line? Audio Prism Noise Sniffer


A friend and audio journalist had this Prism device, and he plugged it into various outlets when I visited him. It gave a clear sense of which outlets were noisy and how effectively his conditioners were helping with noise.

 

He said these were not made any longer. Does anyone know of another tool like this?

It seems like it could save someone with clean power (or a quiet outlet) a lot of money from conditioners/regenerators which would not necessarily help.

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There is a huge, literal gap between professional power quality meters such as by Fluke and audiophile toys. The gap is in the frequency band they cover. The pro’s measure noise and distortion in the range of motor frequencies and the audio band, and the range we care about for power supplies.

The toys they sell audiophiles are usually poorly specified or measuring noise so high in frequency we may never even hear it.

Chasing down a 1 MHz RF signal is a rabbit hole that can send you down spending money you don’t even need to spend.

This is one major reason I like surge and noise filters from Furman wiht SMP and LiFT, as well as the series mode protectors by SurgeX, etc. The series protection starts filtering down at 3 kHz, while many RFI/EMI filters don’t even work below 100 kHz.

My other bit of advice is to separate out noisy wall warts and keep them away from the clean side of your power conditioners.

If you _must_ invest in these power noise ... gizmos, at least find out the range of frequency at which they are working at, so you know what the signals mean.

I had a demo of the audio sniffer thingy.  It really worked.  Plugged into outlets and they were quite noisy.  Then plugged into a power conditioner and which had barely any noise coming from the sniffer.

Pretty sure I don't need a sniffer to know that line power is dirty.  The power on the grid in my neighborhood is about 4% THD.  The output of my regenerator is .1% THD.

Jerry