Anyone Build a Power Regenerator?

[serengetiplains]

From a sonic perspective, the rationale for using these beasts is cleaner music, if you will, or higher fidelity, to be old fashioned. In my system, AC line conditioning provides greater musical enjoyment by not a small margin.

[Eva]

Well, against that kind of claims I can't argue anything. If you like it and it doesn't harm anybody, then use it and enjoy your personal experience

Then again, I have even seen people trying to teach somebody how an equalizer or a compressor works, and moving sliders and knobs up and down while asking "do you hear the effect?", to discover later, much to my surprise, that the by-pass switches were engaged

[jackinnj]

Originally posted by Eva
What is the purpose of generating a sine wave with very low THD and using it to power our audio equipment, when such equipment is just always going to rectify it?

The point is probably less germaine to audio than it is in the realm of physics, astronomy, electron microscopy etc. -- . The reason is that the noise wreaks havoc with ADC's, DAC's and microprocessors, even with a common mode filter.

Here's a picture I took (I think that it was 2 years ago) when I first tried to analyze diode snubbers in line (non switching applicatoins which I realize, Eva, is one of your areas of expertise ). This circuit had a common-mode filter on the front end, very light load (I have to keep better notes). the point of the picture is to illustrate the noise after rectification and filtration



in the old days, i.e. as an undergrad, I worked with very sensitive apparatus measuring tiny magnetic fields -- and the amplifiers and phase-lock loops were all vacuum tube based -- all the measurement apparatus housed in a faraday shield room -- this to keep the electrical noise from the nearby New York City subway system at bay. we regenerated sine waves using McIntosh amplifiers to run the power supplies for the PLL's and amplifiers.

[Eva]

This makes more sense, but in this age of movile phones and wireless internet access for everybody I feel that the offending signals come mostly from the air, not from the mains line itself (altough they are probably picked up by transformers). For example, I live 2 km away from the border of the city, yet my oscilloscope shows a whole lot of stuff when I connect a simple loop of wire to the probe.

We may end up living and working inside faraday-cages...

[serengetiplains]

Eva, think it through. Any form of electrical circuit whatever can be simplistically illustrated as a voltage divider. Any voltage on the input will appear, in part, at the output, noise particularly included. I don't see what is so complicated about that analysis. Jackinnj's illustrations make the point clearly.