Dedicated 20 amp circuit - Electrician laughed!


I brought my electrician out to my house today to show him where I would like to install a dedicated 20a circuit for my system.  He laughed and said that's the stupidest thing he's heard and laughs when people talk about it.  It said, if you're going to do it, you have to have it separately grounded (shoving a new 8 foot rod into the ground) but even then, he sees no way there can be an audible improvement.

Now, he's not just an electrician though. He rebuilds tube amps on the side and tears apart amps and such all the time so he's quite well versed in audio electronics and how they operate.

He basically said anyone who thinks they hear a difference is fooling themselves.  

Personally, I'm still not sure, I'm no engineer, my room's not perfect, and I can't spend hours on end critical listening...  But, he does kinda pull me farther to the "snake oil" side and the "suggestive hearing" side (aka, you hear an improvement because you want to hear it).

I'm not taking a side here but I thought it was interesting how definitive he was that this not only WILL not make a difference but ALMOST CANNOT make a difference. 
dtximages

Showing 6 responses by geoffkait

fleschler
I had four built in 1886, one in 1914 and six in 1926.  

>>>>You’re much older than I thought. 😬
Back in the day, when I was still on the grid, I employed capacitor banks plugged into many unused wall outlets around the house with power cords. The values of these capacitors are provided on the David Magnan Audio site. I even had a bunch of humongous oil filled caps from some decommissioned Navy comm installation.
And yet, there doesn’t seem to be any reports of audiophiles burning down their houses or of exploding high end amplifiers. Imagine that. Was it a Con Job by Con Ed? Is it a big coverup? You decide.
Some Laws are meant to be broken. I broke two this morning and it’s not even lunchtime yet. But some theories have passed from theory to Law. To whit, the Laws of Thermodynamics. We also have F = ma 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
Ah, hem, a theory once proved is a law. You know, like the expansion of the universe, theory of General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravitation, the speed of light = c, E=mc^2 Things of that nature.

In the 1850s, Ohm’s law was known as such and was widely considered proved, and alternatives, such as "Barlow’s law", were discredited, in terms of real applications to telegraph system design, as discussed by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1855.[13]

The electron was discovered in 1897 by J. J. Thomson, and it was quickly realized that it is the particle (charge carrier) that carries electric currents in electric circuits. In 1900 the first (classical) model of electrical conduction, the Drude model, was proposed by Paul Drude, which finally gave a scientific explanation for Ohm’s law. In this model, a solid conductor consists of a stationary lattice of atoms (ions), with conduction electrons moving randomly in it. A voltage across a conductor causes an electric field, which accelerates the electrons in the direction of the electric field, causing a drift of electrons which is the electric current. However the electrons collide with and scatter off of the atoms, which randomizes their motion, thus converting the kinetic energy added to the electron by the field to heat(thermal energy). Using statistical distributions, it can be shown that the average drift velocity of the electrons, and thus the current, is proportional to the electric field, and thus the voltage, over a wide range of voltages.

If you’re trying to win a technical argument there are generally two paths you can take. One is, “It’s a law of electricity or physics.” The other is, “There are no laws, only theories. So it’s only a theory of electricity or physics.” It all depends on which side of the argument you’re on.