@williewonka
Good news! Thanks Steve. The double helix design is definitely going to happen in my system, amongst other items. I plan to try multiples across components and play with it all. Still tinkering with the thought process though, before spending any cash.
I did have a realization regarding my feed cable (which you and some others probably already know...but...to get it out here). I ordered 12-3 Romex for the new home-run feed to the house electrical service panel. Upon receiving and opening the package, a revelation hit me...dang it ....3 wire feed splitting into 2 x 2 wire feeds is the wrong answer for audio...ordering 12-3 was the reflex of the electrician in me.
In a 2 power cable (hot and neutral, or hot and neutral plus ground also being referred to as a 2 wire), the neutral and feed have counter rotating magnetic fields of exactly equal strength, and waves, directly in phase with one another. The delay between them is unmeasurable by anything less than a physicists lab equipment. The 2 fields, rotating in opposite directions of one another, cancel each other out in the center, which is why the ground in 12-2 Romex is placed in the center....so no inductive current is created within the ground.
In a 12-3 (2 hot legs and one neutral, or 2 hot legs plus neutral plus ground wire), the 2 hot legs carry whatever current that circuit is demanding based on the components/load placed on them. This will never be the exact same, will always be out of phase, and is almost always drastically different from one another. The neutral/white in the 12-3 carries, not the total of the 2 hot leads, but the difference of them. So if the black lead is providing 10 amps to amplifiers, and the red lead is providing 3 amps to the television and disc player, their will be a combined concentration of 13 amps of magnetic field at the center of the two hot leads. The neutral will carry back in the other direction the difference of the 2 hot leads. In this example, that would be 7 amps. The counter rotation of the neutral/white magnetic field of 7 amps, will knock the magnetic field of the hot leads down to that of 6 amps, at the center-point of the neutral/white conductor. This remaining magnetic field, will create an inductive low current in the ground of a 3 wire feed application, with the varying and pulsing fields around it, making it very iratic and out of phase. That (small) current induced into the ground then has its own field, which interference with the other wires, causing more field issues. In any kind of appliance, this is no big deal...over years it may have an effect on the life of motors/fans/compressors, to some extent, at worst. But for sensitive audio equipment, this amounts noise and odd-order distortions within the equipment itself, or at the very least, a less pure, and continually unpredictable strength to the power path, that will vary every microsecond.
The conductors of a 3 wire Romex are wrapped in a slow wind to mitigate this to an extent. Your helix design, would actually mitigate this quite nicely, but would be very difficult to build around primary feed cables from the house panel, to the audio receptacle. A quality power conditioner would likely correct most of this issue, but I'm not convinced that phase issues of this complexity can be resolved entirely by power conditioning....though I'll defer to anyone that clearly states that they know for a fact that a power conditioner would.
The moral of the story: when installing dedicated audio circuits in your home, never use 3 wire feeds.
Regards,
Rich
Good news! Thanks Steve. The double helix design is definitely going to happen in my system, amongst other items. I plan to try multiples across components and play with it all. Still tinkering with the thought process though, before spending any cash.
I did have a realization regarding my feed cable (which you and some others probably already know...but...to get it out here). I ordered 12-3 Romex for the new home-run feed to the house electrical service panel. Upon receiving and opening the package, a revelation hit me...dang it ....3 wire feed splitting into 2 x 2 wire feeds is the wrong answer for audio...ordering 12-3 was the reflex of the electrician in me.
In a 2 power cable (hot and neutral, or hot and neutral plus ground also being referred to as a 2 wire), the neutral and feed have counter rotating magnetic fields of exactly equal strength, and waves, directly in phase with one another. The delay between them is unmeasurable by anything less than a physicists lab equipment. The 2 fields, rotating in opposite directions of one another, cancel each other out in the center, which is why the ground in 12-2 Romex is placed in the center....so no inductive current is created within the ground.
In a 12-3 (2 hot legs and one neutral, or 2 hot legs plus neutral plus ground wire), the 2 hot legs carry whatever current that circuit is demanding based on the components/load placed on them. This will never be the exact same, will always be out of phase, and is almost always drastically different from one another. The neutral/white in the 12-3 carries, not the total of the 2 hot leads, but the difference of them. So if the black lead is providing 10 amps to amplifiers, and the red lead is providing 3 amps to the television and disc player, their will be a combined concentration of 13 amps of magnetic field at the center of the two hot leads. The neutral will carry back in the other direction the difference of the 2 hot leads. In this example, that would be 7 amps. The counter rotation of the neutral/white magnetic field of 7 amps, will knock the magnetic field of the hot leads down to that of 6 amps, at the center-point of the neutral/white conductor. This remaining magnetic field, will create an inductive low current in the ground of a 3 wire feed application, with the varying and pulsing fields around it, making it very iratic and out of phase. That (small) current induced into the ground then has its own field, which interference with the other wires, causing more field issues. In any kind of appliance, this is no big deal...over years it may have an effect on the life of motors/fans/compressors, to some extent, at worst. But for sensitive audio equipment, this amounts noise and odd-order distortions within the equipment itself, or at the very least, a less pure, and continually unpredictable strength to the power path, that will vary every microsecond.
The conductors of a 3 wire Romex are wrapped in a slow wind to mitigate this to an extent. Your helix design, would actually mitigate this quite nicely, but would be very difficult to build around primary feed cables from the house panel, to the audio receptacle. A quality power conditioner would likely correct most of this issue, but I'm not convinced that phase issues of this complexity can be resolved entirely by power conditioning....though I'll defer to anyone that clearly states that they know for a fact that a power conditioner would.
The moral of the story: when installing dedicated audio circuits in your home, never use 3 wire feeds.
Regards,
Rich