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
Before I knew Feng Shui Bagua mirrors were supposed to face outdoors I was only warding off myself.
Nothing wrong with Feng Shui, but really, you guys have to check out Marie Kondo, the hoarder whisperer.
Apparently my wife thinks feng shui is Chinese for
"Stuff all your husband’s crap in the garage..."
Man, when I lived in San Francisco I sold all my gear in bulk.

Sumo pre/amp, Tandberg pre/amp, Theta Casanova.

In a 1 bedroom, that was waaaay too much stuff.  Not to mention the speakers I was accumulating.

There are children in Azerbaijan whose souls are dying due to lack of Jazz music and here I was hoarding.
Which Tandberg? The 3K series hyper neutral and quiet....

I would put those in my garage or vintage system in a heartbeat