Power conditioner or not?

[M Gregg]

This is the kind of thing you are up against..

Harmonics in drives and innovative solutions | Engineer Live

How much industry is connected to your supply..

Regards
M. Gregg

 

[freax]

OK, so if you want music at night, you'll need batteries, so why not put the batteries inside your gear, feed the gead with DC, and replace the transformer/PSU with a charger that is switched off when listening ?

That is exactly what I am going to be doing. But without batteries but with Supercapacitors (except for in the main battery bank system).

Congratulations you have discovered my secret plan

It will be feeding a rackmount cabinet with an assortment of voltages with both negative and positive rails. starting from 12v Pos/Neg & 24v Pos/Neg. I will be using Anderson Power Pole Connectors in the 45 amp and 30 amp sizes with the associated colour coding for the correct voltages to prevent crossover and damage to the circuits.

I can then use LM317 and LM337 as well as an assortment of various other linear voltage regulators directly from the DC bus of the rack cabinet. But I won't be using batteries in the DAC or other equipment but Supercaps.

Each Anderson cable will go to a self-made powerbus using 1U of space and then that will go to a 4U rackmount cabinet which can then receive an assortment of DC and AC voltages ranging from 12v-24v DC directly off Solar panels up to 90v-240v AC using a Toroidal transformer.

I'm considering using a DC-DC converter to generate the Negative bus but it shouldnt be too difficult to use an assortment of batteries instead to generate the necessary bus voltages that I need. The question then becomes how to feed them with solar power and if one charge controller fails what are the failure modes.. etc.

I also then need to figure out an adequate amount of isolation from each load so I can run a HAM radio off the same solar charge controller and battery bank as my DAC is using at the present moment. aswell as a couple of computers. I'm thinking of something like chokes and ceramic capacitors creating a low pass filter on four seperated channels for different load banks. One load bank would be for Communications. Another for Low level signal equipment/Audio. Another for Computers. and one last one for Lights and fans.

THEN I need to figure in an adequate amount of safety and isolation from the solar panels to prevent lightning strikes from destroying all of my equipment in one go. I've read that you need to earth the negative side of your battery bank including your solar panel frame for adequate lightning protection. I might also add copper pipe conduit aswell. And don't forget the external waterproof disconnect switch mounted on the outside wall.

As for the Linear voltage regulators I will probably need to install additional choke filtering/capacitor filtering/resistor current limiting and an adequate fuse for the load. I may even need to add a seperate earth for each filtering capacitor on the input of each load to prevent lightning from going through the entire circuit and frying everything.

Then I will be thinking about DIN rail mounting of low voltage circuit breakers. etc. aswell as all of the physical design parameters.

Then I will probably do some toner transfers onto PCB and populate and test the circuits.

The payoff is great however. A continuous low voltage highly efficient supply of both Positive and Negative rails suitable to run even the finest TDA1541 DAC out there with just enough voltage to make even heavy loads like computers worthwhile without going crazy with really thick cables.

A remote control solar panel disconnect switch would be excellent too so I don't have to be at the physical location to disconnect the solar panels in the event of a large thunderstorm.

Its all in the theoretical stage at the moment..

If the voltage was higher than what I'm planning I could probably ask Edison for some helpful tips.

 

[freax]

That is exactly what I am going to be doing. But without batteries but with Supercapacitors (except for in the main battery bank system).

Or I could just make it really easy on myself and make it all 110/240v AC and use an inverter. And accept the inefficiencies.

 

[freax]

This might be of use to someone in this thread:
Harsh Environment - Lightning and Surge Protection

 

[Viennatom_new]

"Thanks. The Tice unit is a very early one. I think it is one of the first units out. It was advertised as having magical treated wire ( pretty sure it's cryo'd ) and it has a double power cord, A solid copper, and a stranded copper, with a box attached, that you can switch from a solid to stranded, or both at once. This is what made a believer out of me that AC power cords can make a difference. "

@Guarnera: Am I right what you are claiming is to be able to hear if the AC cable is solid or stranded copper. lol

 

[Guarnera]

"Thanks. The Tice unit is a very early one. I think it is one of the first units out. It was advertised as having magical treated wire ( pretty sure it's cryo'd ) and it has a double power cord, A solid copper, and a stranded copper, with a box attached, that you can switch from a solid to stranded, or both at once. This is what made a believer out of me that AC power cords can make a difference. "

@Guarnera: Am I right what you are claiming is to be able to hear if the AC cable is solid or stranded copper. lol

Tom,
Yes that's exactly what I am saying. Laugh your *** off if you want, but it's true. I wouldn't of believed it either. I looked inside the switch box, and it doesn't switch between the two. It just adds one to the other. So it might not be the difference in the wire, It might be just that adding more wire to the cord made the difference. I mean it wasn't a day and night difference, but there was a difference in the sound. So either the type of wire or the amount of wire did make a difference in the sound. I used to think interconnects, and speaker wire didn't matter, but it does.

 

[Viennatom_new]

There is exactly one "way" to hear ac cables: By falling for the so called placebo effect. Anything that can not be proven in randomized double blinded tests does simply not exist to the ear. The clever guys at hydrogenaudio working on LAME will explain you that. Even the best ears are so bad that mankind can t even distinguish a 196kBit VBR mp3 from uncompressed CD original. And that (measurable) difference is about 10 - 20 scales bigger than the ac cable.
I can also say that I can judge the kind of fish in a lake 20miles upstream by tasting the flour produced by the millstones driven by the river's waterflow. Its less far-fetched to decide what kind of pea is below 7 pillows than what copper is used within the AC cable.

 

[CharlieLaub]

If I were to invest money in this area of power, I would just try to clean up my ground reference. Anything else is just wasting money IMHO.

 

[Viennatom_new]

You need not even clean up the ground reference if the connections are of perfectly impedance balanced type. It is that easy to fight hum - Just avoid all unbalanced cabling. That and adhere to the old rule of having all the signal components in the chain clip at the same level to avoid noise. "Excess" $$ is best spent into 1. headroom 2. headroom 3. headroom with debatable division of the funds going into amps resp. speakers

 

[TheGimp]

It is not just industrial loads that effect the power quality.

Look at all the computer power supplies with capacitive inputs. These produce harmonic distortion in addition to causing phase shifts that need to be compensated for.

Sure a PS might only pull 100W, but every household has them, along with most solid state appliance (TV, Stereo, etc) use capacitive input power supplies.

You share the supply with the rest of the grid, and it is amazing how far the garbage can go. Every house around you is producing garbage that gets out on the power grid.

Power is a dirty nasty mess today.

 

[CharlieLaub]

You need not even clean up the ground reference if the connections are of perfectly impedance balanced type. It is that easy to fight hum - Just avoid all unbalanced cabling. That and adhere to the old rule of having all the signal components in the chain clip at the same level to avoid noise. "Excess" $$ is best spent into 1. headroom 2. headroom 3. headroom with debatable division of the funds going into amps resp. speakers

Sure, sure, your pedagogical argument for balanced lines is unassailable. But it's also impractical and you can not purchase or build all your equipment to be balanced.

 

[Viennatom_new]

"Sure, sure, your pedagogical argument for balanced lines is unassailable. But it's also impractical and you can not purchase or build all your equipment to be balanced."

Honestly, given the added cost of about 3 - 5 dollars for a very good balanced line interface vs an unbalanced, I herewith call every manufacturer that still uses unbalanced lines unprofessional. Charging big $$ for equipment that has not even the ground hum issue sorted is pure fraud. It looks the "hifi" audio community has a quite long way to go and a steep learning curve ahead if they ever want to arrive at where the pro guys have long since been. The THAT line driver IC comes in various CMR rejection qualities for a few bucks dependent on quantity. While balancing transformers are expensive and can have lots of issues, there is no excuse for not using this IC solution or a similar circuit for any piece of equipment that is priced above $100 or so.

 

[Viennatom_new]

"It is not just industrial loads that effect the power quality.
Look at all the computer power supplies with capacitive inputs. These produce harmonic distortion in addition to causing phase shifts that need to be compensated for.
Sure a PS might only pull 100W, but every household has them, along with most solid state appliance (TV, Stereo, etc) use capacitive input power supplies.
You share the supply with the rest of the grid, and it is amazing how far the garbage can go. Every house around you is producing garbage that gets out on the power grid.
Power is a dirty nasty mess today."

As a power supply design engineer dealing with this stuff for 15 years, I can tell you that you are absolutely right.
But why care about the line waveform / distortion if it is rectified into a pool of big DC electrolytics anyway? The only guys to complain are the power stations they have 2 deal with reactive loads / harmonics etc.
And even if there is the theoretical possibility to have line distortions affect the DC bus voltage ripple w-form (ok, it is to a small degree...), that does not explain in any way why the different forms of copper in the last meters of AC line would make any difference onto this.

 

[TheGimp]

I have no argument about power cables. I'm just pointing out the increased need for power line conditioning.

There are a lot of harmonics throughout the audio band (up into the KHz range). This requires greater thought in power supply design and construction than it did 30 years ago.