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Keep noise creators outside your clean power zone

Hi Everyone,

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
erik_squires
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 

bob540
This makes me think of the guy who commented here, after seeing my set-up, that I had too much cluttered together. I took that as meaning the clutter was visually unsettling, but having read Erik’s comment, I’m thinking now that he might have been referring to noise being generated by the proximity of several pieces of electronic equipment (though I guess he might also have been referring to reflections?).

>>>>>There is a third and more mysterious reason, gentle readers, why clutter is bad for the sound. I don’t wish to appear messianic or overly mysterious but think of it like Feng Shui. Having an organized and uncluttered space is good for everything, you can also think of it as minimizing entropy. Especially bad for sound - and I’d don’t mean to be ironic here - are CDs, magazines, books, newspapers, LPs, videos, and extra unused electronics and cables you might have lying around. Even musical instruments. How’s that for irony?
thecarpathian's avatar
thecarpathian
4,879 posts
 
Geoff, I see you've stopped dying your hair. Or did you start dying your hair?
Either way, much like your posts, tres avant garde......
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
It’s a Sonny Bono wig. 
thecarpathian's avatar
thecarpathian
4,879 posts
 
Oh. I got you, babe.
bob540
416 posts
 
Wow, I guess you could say that my whole life is cluttered (I blame my mother, who always told me, “Save everything.  You never know when it will come in handy!” . . . . “Yes, Mother”.   It was my father who showed me that saving too much, such that nothing can be located and put back, can be as bad as never saving anything.

Fortunately, I am not as bad as Mother was (after she passed and we went through her belongings, we found a utility bill from 1949!), but I am indeed bitten.  I even save old buttons, in hopes that one day I will find the missing shirts or compatible ones.   I have tried to fight back against my thoughts that, “Just when I throw this away, I will find out what it goes to and will kick myself.”  And, every once in a while, I do find out what the thing belonged to and restore it to its rightful location, and for that moment everything feels right with the world.
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