Not sure where to put this, so I decided I would just share it here. It sort has to do with power supplies. I took my old Welborne Labs Gatekeeper X1 and modified its design for better filtration. Since it was getting on 5+ years old, I first replaced the MOV's, as they probably needed it. The design follows a common design available on the internet, but uses Welborne Labs inductor method, which should offer lower resistance and less current limiting. Normal designs use inductors in the signal which often are limited in current capacity to something like 5-10 amps, maybe 12 if you are lucky. Welborne's method uses a string of ferrite beads held together in a tube with heatstrink, and the power wires run through these beads. Jon Risch notes in his design to use inductors rated at between 50 and 100uH's, and my primary concern with the Welborne method, was that inductance would not be high enough. If 3"s of beads could create that much inductance, why wouldn't more people do it, right? Well I measured things with an LCR, and sure enough, they are high enough. I measured roughly 75uH's of inductance. In Jon's design, there are capacitors running from H to G and N to G, as well as H to N. However, the original Welborn only had one large 1uf x rated cap from H to N. I decided to put some .1uf caps from H to G and N to G, then the 1uf from H to N, and a .01uf cap at each outlet bank. I also rewired it with 10 guage continuous cast copper wire and a Teflon dielectric. I had it, figured it couldn't hurt things.
Currently I have my main amplifier plugged into it, but not my 3 channel ht amp (It has an almost identical circuit and very robust power supply, it doesn't need it), as well as my dvd/BR player, pre/pro, and record player. I found it got rid of some noise I had in the background compared to before, but otherwise found the difference very subtle, at best. I've been told that Mundorf has some excellent X rated caps I might want to try, so maybe if I feel like throwing a lot of money on caps for a conditioner, I may give it a shot. However, I think the next step with be another string of ferrite beads, to raise the inductance to around 120uH's+.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Currently I have my main amplifier plugged into it, but not my 3 channel ht amp (It has an almost identical circuit and very robust power supply, it doesn't need it), as well as my dvd/BR player, pre/pro, and record player. I found it got rid of some noise I had in the background compared to before, but otherwise found the difference very subtle, at best. I've been told that Mundorf has some excellent X rated caps I might want to try, so maybe if I feel like throwing a lot of money on caps for a conditioner, I may give it a shot. However, I think the next step with be another string of ferrite beads, to raise the inductance to around 120uH's+.