Did the author of that “PM” happen to go by one or all of the following names: John Miller, John Baron or David Dennison?
Keep noise creators outside your clean power zone
Hi Everyone,
Just a tip for those of you who have invested in power conditioners:
Power conditioners, unless fully active, are just filters. They are not magic blessing devices. What I mean is that the power that comes in gets filtered, and sent out, but it can be contaminated again! It’s just like your water supply. Makes no sense to use fancy water filters, and storing it in a dirty bucket.
If you can, avoid using wall warts, and network devices like Wifi routers, switches, video streamers etc. on the clean side of your conditioner because they will contaminate the already filtered power. If you have a conditioner with multiple zones, put all your noisy neighbors on the same dirty zone.
I try to solve this by using a less expensive but still very good power strip to create a "de-militarized zone." DMZ for short. The Furman PST-8 is a great way to do this, because it does include really good filtering which goes down to about 3 kHz.
Plug it directly into the wall, not into your conditioner. This will give you the most number of filters between your wall warts and your audio. Of course, other alternatives are to use linear power supplies exclusively, but even then, anything with a network or CPU in it can generate noise that makes it through the power supply.
Lots of other conditioners will work, of course, the Furman with SMP just has great noise handling and ~ $120 is much more affordable than alternatives.
Whatever you do, keep your noisy neighbors outside your clean zone.
Best,
E
Just a tip for those of you who have invested in power conditioners:
Keep things which generate noise outside of your clean zone.
Power conditioners, unless fully active, are just filters. They are not magic blessing devices. What I mean is that the power that comes in gets filtered, and sent out, but it can be contaminated again! It’s just like your water supply. Makes no sense to use fancy water filters, and storing it in a dirty bucket.
If you can, avoid using wall warts, and network devices like Wifi routers, switches, video streamers etc. on the clean side of your conditioner because they will contaminate the already filtered power. If you have a conditioner with multiple zones, put all your noisy neighbors on the same dirty zone.
I try to solve this by using a less expensive but still very good power strip to create a "de-militarized zone." DMZ for short. The Furman PST-8 is a great way to do this, because it does include really good filtering which goes down to about 3 kHz.
Plug it directly into the wall, not into your conditioner. This will give you the most number of filters between your wall warts and your audio. Of course, other alternatives are to use linear power supplies exclusively, but even then, anything with a network or CPU in it can generate noise that makes it through the power supply.
Lots of other conditioners will work, of course, the Furman with SMP just has great noise handling and ~ $120 is much more affordable than alternatives.
Whatever you do, keep your noisy neighbors outside your clean zone.
Best,
E
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- 67 posts total
Quote from Miller Carbon, ‘Got a PM just now, so good I have to share it in its entirety: Factual, tight, well-reasoned, compelling. Bye!’ Dude, that is below the belt. FWIW.. i admire your devotion and you are super knowledgable no doubt. Much respect. But in the famous words of Rodnay ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ |
Yeah, no, it doesn’t work like that. Not even close.Yeah, actually it can work like that. Not long ago I had the exact problem Eric was referencing, with a streaming device's wall-wart smps causing noise that bled into my phono preamp. Some wall warts (the heavy ones) are indeed just a linear PS in a plastic case, others are SMPS and usually the culprit of circuit pollution. |
- 67 posts total