Home Tweakers' Asylum

Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

How dirty is your AC?

We don't know until you do the experiment and determine the point of diminishing returns.

In my house, I use a 1 KVA filament transformer with a damped secondary in place of a Hammond choke as a parallel filter on the dedicated AC circuit that feeds my Wadia CD player. Even with this device, I find benefit from treating the other dedicated lines to my monoblock amps, and the other convenience outlet circuits throughout the house. Filters at the primary noise sources also help.

Think of damping your house's AC circuits in the sense of damping a car's suspension. You may recall seeing an old junk car with inoperative dampers ("shocks") on the highway: the wheels bounce up and down continuously and the car bounces several times every time it hits a bump. This is like your house wiring without chokes or dampers installed. The effects of RF noise are magnified by resonances in the house wiring.

On the other hand, there can be too much damping. Put racing dampers on a passenger car and the ride is seriously degraded. Too many chokes or too much resistive damping may increase the reflections of RF noise within your house wiring and degrade the audio system performance.

Since the optimum amount of damping is difficult to predict, buy the chokes a few at a time, let them settle, and listen carefully for improvements. If adding a choke does not seem to improve things, move it to another circuit or put it aside. You may need it later if you change the wiring or set of non-audio appliances in your house.


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