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Electrical circuit "noise"

I suspect a few of you might find this post of interest regarding “noise” in cables and audio gear. I am on the Board of Directors of Verdigris Technologies, if any interested it is an AI company for managing electricity (www.verdigris.co). We got our start by recognizing that anything plugged into an electrical circuit, not only draws power, but also emits a rather unique signature back into the electrical circuit. The challenge is that as multiple electrical appliances are plugged into a single circuit, the signatures are all jumbled together. We developed unique technology that enables us to disaggregate all those jumbled signals to identify exactly which products are plugged into a circuit, and even identify early warning signs of failure, and we have patents regarding this technology. My point in all this is that it is clear that anything plugged into a circuit carries these multiple signatures from whatever is plugged into the circuit into any audio equipment plugged into the same circuit, and it is logical that at some level the garbage noise is is audible. So I think that it matters a lot how electrical power is managed, and that includes the cables used at each step of the audio food chain. Many of us don’t have the ability to have a unique circuit for just our audiophile gear, which is probably the best alternative, and so need to rely on products like regenerators and cables that reject noise to attempt to clean up and eliminate these unwanted garbage signals.
128x128cdnorris
cdnorris's avatar
cdnorris OP
9 posts
 
Millercarbon, thanks for your thoughtful response, and I think you get it and summarized my point quite well. At the present time we are focused on our commercial business, and I fear I am one of the only folks into audio at our company. Unfortunately, we have not had the time to look into cables and related audio issues, and I suspect we will not have the cycles to look into these issues any time soon.
sandthemall
544 posts
 
It seems almost everyone here is about 30? Don't worry, you'll grow out if it.
richtruss
163 posts
 
@cdnorris Thank you for taking the time to inform of your companies research, I appreciated it.

millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Is it primarily back EMF you are analyzing? Or something else? It is easy to imagine how something like an electric motor could generate a signal that could be a sign of coming failure. Brushes on an armature for example might wear and arc and this could be detected on the AC line. 

A lot of the noise we have is RFI. Or at least we think it is. I have done simple tests that would seem to indicate it is RFI.

If for example you turn off breakers going to circuits with appliances running and the sound improves (it does) that could be due to the sort of line noise your AI is designed to detect. But then if you also turn off breakers going to circuits with no appliances, no nothing even plugged in, and the sound also improves this cannot be due to back EMF or appliance noise. The only thing I can think of then is RFI. This does happen. I have tested it multiple times, including blind tests where the listener has no idea what is going on, they definitely hear the improvement. (It is not subtle!) 

So curious to know if your work is so specialized it only detects the one and not the other, or can you differentiate? Because yours is the first to be analyzing like this (patent, duh). But at the same time I would like to think that at least some of the designers of conditioners are looking into this, if for no other reason than if you want to eliminate noise it usually helps to know where it is coming from. Because in general the more you know about what you are trying to do the better your chances of actually doing it. If they are studying anything like this, I sure don't recall ever hearing about it.
calvinandhobbes
301 posts
 
@cdnorris Thank you for sharing what your company has learned. Rejection or reduction of RFI and other forms of analog EMI seems to be the improvement that many audio products seen as "snake oil" can actually make in sound quality. The 'bits are bits' crowd doesn't seem to understand that that RFI from the analog domain can generate jitter in the digital domain.
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