Power Conditioning done by IC's & Speaker Cables

Bybee filters worked really well on my loudspeakers, but that's no substitute for line conditioning. Goto www.dezorel.com and download their "Noise Basics" file. It's a good starting point.

I don't believe a power cord should be a filter. But, what do I know?

Psychic: What is the difference of employing some type of "filter action" in a power cord or putting it inside of a fancy box ? Granted, one can go "whole hog" if you have a larger platform or chassis work with, but other than that, i don't see much of a difference as to how it is done or what it looks like. The bottom line is that the "junk" gets filtered / attenuated out of the AC line, whatever the means. Sean
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That's a good point/question, Sean. From my naive perspective, I would think that if you can filter out the noise prior to processing in your source, pre, and amp, the results would be for the better.

Cleaner in, cleaner out. But again perhaps I'm being naive.

Can a speaker cable really catch just as much noise at the end of the process as could be caught at the beginning?

Or wouldn't the speaker cabling need the capability to filter out even more noise because whatever noise came in from the AC has now been amplified to one extent or another?

If the answer is yes, anybody care to name the cable manufacturer and model?

Quote: "Psychic: What is the difference of employing some type of "filter action" in a power cord or putting it inside of a fancy box ?"

Answer: There is no difference--theoretically.

Now, by having one component perform *two* functions, try to evaluate its sonic signature and its filtration performance at the same time. I like my filtration happening elsewhere...

Quote: "Can a speaker cable really catch just as much noise at the end of the process as could be caught at the beginning?"

From what I understand there's some speaker cables that filter stuff. I think Empirical Audio does have such designs and has an explanation in the website (www.empiricalaudio.com). There is an explanation of line noise generated *within* the wire in the Bybee website (www.bybeetech.com). I went for the Bybees because Dan Wright insisted they were necessary and I accepted what the Bybee website exposed. I had also done searches on the Asylum and Harmonic Discord. Pretty controversial what I found. Eventually, Dan's posting on this matter in Audiogon clarified me as to why the controversy.

The Bybees proved to work great in my speakers--definitely worth the money. It's good to know effective filtration is happening at the last minute, just before the signal enters the voice coil. I can see that with all the mods my speaker's efficiency increased by about 2dB.

Any filtering that you are getting in a power cord or conditioner will have an effect on the dynamics or the noise (common-mode). Filtering in IC's or speaker cables directly filter (roll-off) the signal high-frequencies. This is not the same type of filtering.

Chances are, that you have a ground-loop that is adding common-mode noise to your system and the conditioners are helping to reduce this. Also, but less likely, you may have excessive HF noise on the power line that is getting past some power supplies in some components. It is worth trying to deterimine if it is the ground-loop by floating the grounds on all components except one and not using the conditioners. If the noise floor drops and the sound is pristine, then the ground-loop is at fault.

As for noise induced by cables, this is certainly possible as well. If you have IC's with jumbled crystal lattice in the conductors, then you will get soem sibilance from this. The speaker cables can have filtering to eliminate this. However, it is better just to eliminate the sibiliance by getting the right IC's. Likewise with the speaker cables. I recommend that my customers not use any power conditioning unless it is a regenerative device or a simple isolation transformer.