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
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.
Had to drop by for a moment just to say.... First some special snowflake gets triggered and of course mini-Mao removes the post. But too late, another one triggered, copied and pasted the whole thing. So its still up there for you all to read the truth about yourselves. Which includes such a lack of self-awareness you leave that post up. Hilarious. 

If one of you would now be kind enough to copy and paste this one, so its up even after it gets removed (which, Kafkaesque, look it up) that would be ROTFLMFAO hilarious! 

Miller
You should have stayed in your ’end of the world’ bunker, counting your cans of beans and bottles of Purell with all your friends instead of once again displaying that sparkling personality.
I’m guessing you built a one man shelter......