Power Conditioners

A while back I was dealing with this question and had some really nice exchanges with recently passed Almarg.

Al, you might not know, had a quite a lot of experience. He summed it up to me this way:

Re my background, I’m a retired electrical engineer, with a little bit of a legal background as well. Specifically:

• BS in Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
• MS in Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute JD (Law Degree), University of Connecticut
• Licensed Attorney and Patent Attorney
• 33 years experience designing and managing design of analog, digital, A/D converter, and D/A converter circuits for defense electronics, primarily airborne radar systems.

Al said he had hit upon a reasonably priced and, in his view, sufficient solution. Here’s what he suggested and what I bought:

Three things to buy:

(a) Audience Adept Response aR2p power conditioner — found it used
(b) Wiremold Legrand powerstrip (available at Newark)
(c) Shunyata Research Venom Defender AC Power Line Reducer — found it used

Hooking it up:
(a) Audience plugs into the wall.
(b) Powerstrip plugs into the Audience
(c) Shunyata plugs into Powerstrip.

My total cost was $578.

Done

So if wall warts go into the dirty zone, does it also mean the DAC and the record player? Only amp and CD player have grounded power cables so they go into the clean zone?

Dirty/clean is not about having a ground plug.  The ground plug is usually a safety, not a noise, feature.

But anything with a digital power supply and/or processor is something I try to put in it's own, like network routers and switches.

Agree with Eric. Additionally a well designed DAC will have a Faraday Cage AND a linear PSU so you can put it on the clean side.

@hilde45 thanks for making my day by quoting Al

we are so much diminished by his loss

+1 @tomic601