easily done…
It like most things, until you try it you just don’t know.
My dedicated mains supply at home here in the UK, in a quite village, my system sounded fantastic, but the balanced supply made things better again.
If it was going to cost thousands then i wouldn’t have bothered, but mine was just over £500 a few years ago, but it’s about £600 ish now, still great value.
All you need to do is make sure you are double the size in output, over what all the transformers are in the system, and job done. Then an electrician to connect the 6 wires into your dedicated hifi supply.
Whilst that may indeed to be true where a household has a lot of SMPSs of varying qualities and ages, I think the sweeping statement not to plug any SMPSs into the clean side of the supply is over generalised: my understanding is that with good design an SMPS need not put any pollution into the mains, and IIRC there are pieces of hi-fi kit with good quality non-polluting SMPSs. Others with more specific direct knowledge of such kit may be able to be more definitive.
I have had significant DC offset in my last 3 rental homes, spanning from Texas to Tennessee. Despite this, my Topaz was pretty quiet. Transitioning to balanced output on the secondary absolutely removed all physical hum, even with my ear pressed against the enclosure for a moment.
Further, all of my Naim transformers are now 100% silent even with ear-to-case.
Sonically, it was a revelation. Quiet spaces between passages turned into massive spaces of nearly infinite blackness. Grain/grit was GONE. Texture from top to bottom was organically enhanced. PRaT was turbocharged and faster/stronger than ever…but never with artifice.
Oh and my Supernait 3 runs about 3C cooler (ΔT over ambient), and my NDX 2 runs 2C cooler on top of their transformers being completely silent.
For the purposes of musical involvement alone, it is worth it for me. I have found a way to hide it in my living room; with two silent Noctua 80mm fans at their ULN setting and under a woven cat litterbox enclosure. Transformer stays silent and never more than 10C above ambient. And I receive “perfect midnight sound quality” 24/7.
2 Likes
You realize there was noise only the day it’s removed.
3 Likes
So true
2 Likes
Oh and I want to add that the strength of the earth ground connection for your service panel plays a HUGE role in SQ as well. At every rental, I ended up bolstering mine with better/additional copper-rod clamps and…without fail, sound quality improved across the board.
When I purchase a home again, I’ll be working with a local electrician to install a deeper copper ground rod, connected to a second ground rod of equal length, via direct-burial solid copper cable (likely some absurd awg like 1 or 0). I listened to a friend’s setup in Texas who did this exact thing (before and after) and WOW.
1 Like
I was lucky in my house as i used the gas pipe in coming to earth my hifi side to as the house isvon the water mains in and electricity supply in as well
1 Like
I started a thread called “Suffering from those transformer hum blues?” a few years ago.
It’s quite a long thread and is full of useful as well as useless stuff. If you search for Bluesfan and Airlink or BPS you should find a few references and photos.
Long story short, we installed an Airlink Transformers BPS5000 which stopped all the transformer hum from the cd power supply, the supercap and the NAP135 transformers. Made music cleaner, smoother and more lovely, without causing rhythms to slow down & drag.
It’s still in the hifi’s dedicated radial supply to this day.
Best regards, BF
1 Like