Best place to live for good quality power


For those of you who have traveled around the world with your hi-fi, what have you learned about where to live for the best power?

- Dense city but right near a substation

- Or far from a substation is ok, as long as few houses on the grid (rural)?

Etc

Some of you are into batteries, but lets talk about how location affects power.

thanks in advance

 

clustrocasual

first define quality.

 

The vast majority of issues we ensure are noise related.

 

Noise comes nto from the service provider but from equipment operating on the grid, often right in your neighborhood. I'm talking to you air conditioner, or the millions of capacitor input power supplies not-so-gently clippng the opts off waves and delivering back emf into the power network.

So its us.  And its a question of time - what hour? What day? what season?

 

Get a good filter. And honestly, not all equipment does an equally good job of rejecting noise.

@itsjustme 

But this is exactly my question. Some people said living away from noise-polluting sources does not guarantee a good sound - such as rural areas with terrible physical infrastructure. So I assumed majority was noise-related, but may not be true. If the power from the source is very poor, thats a problem.

First don't obsess. Second, I thought I was clear the problem is not the source. For a bunch of technical reasons I won't get into there is really no such thing as a poor source. Just pollution between the source and you. Therefore the answer is a filter. When I say filter it could be a passive filter or is one person suggested a regenerator — which is an awesome filter but carries with it lots of other problems like high source impedance.

@itsjustme

+1. You can do something about noisy power. It is also relatively cheap and simple to improve compared to others.

How quiet your listening room is really important. If you can drop your listening room to the 20 - 30db range you give your system an enormous advantage.

Of course, you can do something about noise pollution… Moving to the country can greatly reduce this. Or spend a lot of money insulting you room and or house. But that will not reduce physical vibration which improves sound quality from components… from cars and trucks rolling by, airplanes and other urban stuff.

 

Then there is room geometry and acoustics. Huge impact.

There are so many variables to control. Powers just one.

A long time ago Stan Warren told me the best power he's experienced comes from living near a dam used for hydroelectric power. As long as there's water...

All the best,
Nonoise