Dedicated line questions

Sorry Greysquirrel, but the mainline wire really is directional. Redkiwi suggested it, and so I tried it myself and got the differences in direction as noted in my above post. Albert Porter covered grounding better than I could. My electricians just grounded the sub-main panel that had my four dedicated lines into it, and as I understand it, the closer ther better, but closeness of grounding is not necessary. It's hard to separate the effects of the grounding versus the dedicated lines-- it all works together, ie I did not try them separately, but I got greatly lowered noise floor with the whole system. Re: directionality, I was able to run the main wire outside the wall to check directionality before final installation through the attic, eg I ran wire from the main to submain and then listened to each direction. Good Luck. Craig.

Hi Korn. Albertporter has covered the ground arrangement. I have found that the results vary. In one case we found a dramatic reduction in noise, and an improvement that was more significant than the dedicated AC feed. In another case we heard NO difference at all by putting a dedicated earth in. Don't risk getting the directionality wrong or you will be disappointed in the results of your efforts and investment. As Garfish suggests - get enough AC feeder cable to do the job and then just run it from your board through your house or outside (ie. not installed in the walls just yet) and listen to what it does. Then run it the other way. There will be a difference. I have found that one manufacturer's product sounds better when run in the same direction as the writing on the outer of the cable, while anothers' sounds better in the opposite direction to the writing. You have actually got quite a lot of useful information in the above posts if you read them carefully, and all of it gels with my experience. Beware that the end result will cause your system to become a lot more lively and will much more transparently reveal any problems in your components. I am sceptical at Audiowhore's suggestion that the PS Audio makes the AC feed irrelevant. I have not tried a PS Audio unit but the comments I have heard indicate to me that it suffers at least some of the problems of all filters - ie. that it is a trade-off between lower noise floor and compressed dynamics. With a dedicated AC feed and good power cords, I find the benefits of a filter are small and the downsides are unacceptable. When PS Audio have a 240V version I will give it a try.

The PS Audio power plant does a pretty good job at making dedicated power irrevelant (although I must admit that I havn't tried my system with dedicated power to compare it to the power plant). One thing that it does _not_ make irrevalent is a dedicated ground. By US law (I dunno about other countries), it cannot touch the ground. But you can disconnect the unit's ground from the house ground, and use your own instead. It would be very unfortunate to unhook the unit's ground and not have a seperate ground :). Another advantage to the PS audio power plant is that you can increase the cycle rate from 50/60 Hz up to 120 Hz. For my setup, I noticed a slight improvement bumping it up to 85-90Hz, and degridation after that point. Redkiwi: I've only noticed better dynamics with this. Dynamics could be compressed if you, say, used an amp that uses more peak watts than the PS device can produce. For front end gear, the peak current isn't too much higher than normal current, so it would probably be OK. BTW, they do have an export version which puts out 220 or 240V (but it's a bit more expensive than the 117V version). The PS Audio web page is excellent, and Paul McGowan (the designer) is very helpful answering questions. And no, I do not work for PS Audio :).

Thanks Audaibnjad. I remain a sceptic since similar claims have always proven to be false (such as jitter elimination etc.), but I will see if I can get my hands on one to try.

Guys, thanks for all the responses, i would be lying if i didn't admit that much of what u guys are talking about is going way way over my head. this is my thing. the breaker board or whatever u call it for my house just happens to be in my listening room, can i just not buy a 20 amp fuse, put it in one of the empty slots, run power chord from it to my hospital grade hubbles, and voila, dedicated power line?????