Dedicated Power Lines

Minorl,

What is your take on the reason why you should put all your audio equipment on one leg and putting all your noisy devices on the other to avoid noise transfer. My understanding is a electrical device sucks electricity in and it's a one way street, the device then generates noise, etc., which then goes back into the system via the neutral or return line. The return line for both legs are then tied together along with the ground, making the ground a very important point to eliminate noise, and not the hot line as the key culprit.

There are many ways that noise can be added to the power lines. Large industrial motors, generators on the system, etc. However, when in your home, it can come from florescent lighting, refrigerator motors, microwaves, etc. You can actually scope the power line and see noise on it. A very good piece of equipment will have inherent internal power supply filtering that will remove the vast majority of this noise when converting to DC. Some have large coils in the power supply circuitry also that help with this. Your friendly neighborhood power company will acutally test your home system (if you complain and ask) and see if noise is present, or low voltage, or flickering (yes voltage flickering). Here is how you fix this. 1) remove all bad lighting,2) get a decent power conditioner for your low level electrics to plug into as I mentioned previously. I wouldn't swap around circuitry in the home. This is really a non-issue to me. If one is careful, run dedicated lines (with separate and unshared neutrals and ground conductors), proper interconnect cabling helps. I'm the first house off the power transformer for my area, so I have great voltage. Four dedicated lines for my system (which includes separate ground and neutrals for each dedicated line), CD, TT, Tuner, Pre-amp, Phono stage, DAC, electronic crossover all plugged into a very nice power conditioner and that is plugged into a dedicated circuit. Two stereo amps each plugged into its own dedicated circuit. Result, dead quiet.No ground loop, no refrigerator noise, no microwave noise, no lighting noise, no flickering, no voltage sagging, just music. However, I do believe it is important to not share neutrals or grounds on lines for the music system.

A few thoughts.
1.The home insurance issue is major. Be legal or very possibly be out of luck even if the fire fault was not the wiring you installed!
2.Go big guage (10)and just as important- quality well shielded wire. Best bet would to scavenge some excess wire used for robotic controls. It has stringent and valuable characteristics far surpassing the generics you speak of- and the design quality is for robust, failsafe accurate signal transmission-quite desirable for high quality power supply, regardless of the power level.
3.Remember that an average load of even 6 or 7 amps will probably result in instantaneous draws of up to 150 amps. Bigger guage is beneficial.
4. noise from equipment can reflect on all 3 lines.
5. I'm assuming what you want is adaquate clean power to your equipment.With the price of copper and labor today I highly suggest a consultation with an electrician regarding load distribution and economical ways of making what you have accomodate your requirements for power.
6. to clean your power consider installing 1, 2 or 3 of the Equitech (I have zero affiliation or interest)"blemished", cheap balanced transformers. Fabulous improvement-way ahead of dedicated line. Dedicated lines are still garbage laden from the outside power utility and noise from your home. Finely balanced power works miracles. (if its good enough for super delicate medical and research work , NASA, etc, it will benefit you.
(I have a so called state of the art preamp with a lauded separate ps. Adding the balanced transformer was like--magic. It clearly revealed the power supply to be the weakest link(very weak) in my otherwise terrific pre.
7. under no circumstances have digital,television,etc connected to same power source as your sensitive analog electronics. I've been fussy about power and conditioning for years and it has paid off; however, it wasn't until I established a separate isolation transformer for my digital source , on top of all dedicated lines and balanced transformer isolation for my pre and amp, that I really got the full benefit of years of working on my system.
It is magic for digital; all the big boys are well aware of it.
Best wishes. Pete

Jea48. Your comments were great. I had emphasized to call an electrician, and emphasized going by the code. You have really clarified the proper approach to the entire setup. I thank you for all the readers who benefited from your detailed, and for the most part, unknown knowledge.

I came across this thread and thought I would post something a little different than what other people are doing. I decided to isolate my digital from my analog.

I have 3 30 amp 220 volt circuits feeding my stereo with 10 gage wire in my new dedicated room. The circuits are feeding 3 power isolators two 3 kilowatt isolators and one 5 kilowatt isolator. The isolators are transformer based units. The 5 kilowatt isolator has two 110 volt feeds, one for analog and one for digital. The 3 kilowatt isolators each feed 1 mono block amp. I am using hospital grade copper plugs to feed all my gear.

This seems to work well for my system. The isolators are located under my house on a concrete slab off so I don’t hear the hum. I like using 220 volt better so you don’t have to run a neutral line to the isolator. Seems like to me the neutral line is where a lot of the noise comes from.