In yesterday's post I had said that you can't unknow something and boy is that true.
Once I had realized the main culprit to holding back the performance of our beloved HiFi systems was the impedance of the AC power delivered to our wall sockets—and then got slapped over the head with the worse news ever, that the very means by which power is delivered into our homes—the wires themselves—was making the problem so much worse, I was half ready to throw in the towel on my dream project.
And then things went even further downhill.
I knew that the AC power leaving my city's power generating station was a beautiful sine wave—exactly what the HiFi Doctor ordered. Pure, clean, steady power. What I never stopped to consider was the quality of the sine wave after it traveled through miles and miles of wires and transformers before reaching my home. And if that weren't enough I figured out an even bigger issue—sharing. We share the power grid with industry, stores, and worst of all, our neighbors. Yup. That neighbor next door? You know, then one with the irritating barking dog? You share your power with them. And, why does that matter?
Because the more people using the power at the same time the worse the shape of the sine wave gets. In fact, because all AC power sine waves are synchronized in time, whenever the sine wave rises to the top of its range for me, it is doing the same for every single person on the same grid throughout the state.
And what that means is that at the peak of the sine wave, right when we most need it to be full and beautiful, it's often clipped and hideous. Looks something like this:
When this happens it means the energy we need to charge up our capacitors is missing. Gone.
When does the bad news stop?
Think about where I am at in my quest. I now understand the following:
- The single most important aspect to getting great sound from our equipment is achieved by lowering the impedance of the AC power.
- Any power conditioner that effectively cleans the power does so by adding impedance and thus, we get cleaner sound but at a cost in sonics we're unwilling to pay.
- The only effective way of improving the AC quality is by placing something in series and that doesn't work (see point 2).
- Our homes are connected via hundreds and hundreds of feet of wire that adds resistance and makes this worse.
- And even if we were to get around those issues, the actual quality of the sine wave sucks.
I was in a real pickle. All I could see in front of me was bad news getting worse.
Then, I had an idea. A flash idea that just popped into my head.
Yes, old Rube Goldberg would have thought this so nuts as to probably publish it in one of his cartoons—but still, great ideas usually start out as crazy fantasies. At least for me they do.
