In the summer, I keep the window open and get up with the birds. They start cranking around 4:45 a.m. here so I roll out and make coffee shortly after 5:00 a.m Memo to file: the birds do get up earlier in France.
I had a HP5328 with the high rez, ovenized reference, and the line frequency was all over the place so I don't know if it's gonna matter.
I had a HP5328 with the high rez, ovenized reference, and the line frequency was all over the place so I don't know if it's gonna matter.
The performance of 59.95 hz is less than one part in 10,000. That's less than 0.01% and should be inaudible even to the most golden eared audiophiles. Some turntables with hysteresis syncronous motors like my Empires have a fine adjustment which consists of a variable diamter motor pulley that can be tilted back and forth with a knurled thumb screw. Using a strobe the turntable can be adjusted to prevent "walking." I don't expect I'd hear a difference with other HS motor driven turntables though. The tolerance is well within the old NAB standards for turntable speed accuracy and consistancy (wow and flutter.) Many good turntables also have massive platters that exhibit a flywheel effect due to rotational moment of inertia. This further filters speed variations. from the motor. Most clocks today are quartz oscillator driven, even very cheap ones.
Mine certainly syncs to the mains.
Electronic washing machines and dryers also count mains cycles for timing.
The majority is produced by coal. There's a few big hydro plants and a few nuclear plants that make up just about all of the rest. I heard there's a diesel or other fossil-fuel burning plant on Manhattan that only gets turned on during peak demand. Maybe there's a very few other such plants, but it's very doubtful the petroleum reserves has any connection with this.
Hundreds of millions of people. Every line-powered clock radio with a digital display sold in the USA uses the line frequency for timing (at least every one I've heard of). The first digital clock chips were in the 1970's - I recall some late-70's Popular Electronics magazine with an article on "build your own digital alarm clock" based on one of the chips.
These chips also have a crude (that is, cheap) RC oscillator to be powered by a 9 volt battery for when the power goes out. This works great for dropouts and short outages, but outages of an hour or more can cause the displayed time to be off by several minutes.
I've even got a couple of oscilloscopes that will sync to the line!
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