Electrical circuit "noise"

Well said. Yours is the first I have seen of anyone objectively analyzing this down to the level of being able to detect devices on a circuit. Makes total sense. 

Probably many different things are going on all at once. AC current starts to flow, but being audio never in a continuous steady flow, so it hits any connection or device there is an impedance shift and a wave reflects back. That is just one. Then the device whether it be brushes on a stator like your air conditioner pumps or diode switching in a component it probably emits another different wave going back into the line. 

All kinds of things like this. As you say it is one thing to detect and prevent a failure, quite another to listen and analyze in order to determine which of these various noise sources does what in terms of sound quality. Then maybe we find out one sort of noise flattens the sound stage. Just guessing here, a total for instance, but if we knew that then maybe we could design something tailored or focused to do that.

To think of just one possible application.

Great stuff. If you knew the stuff some of us are using, I could hook you up with someone you could really do some great work with. Seriously.

Is it primarily back EMF you are analyzing? Or something else? It is easy to imagine how something like an electric motor could generate a signal that could be a sign of coming failure. Brushes on an armature for example might wear and arc and this could be detected on the AC line. 

A lot of the noise we have is RFI. Or at least we think it is. I have done simple tests that would seem to indicate it is RFI.

If for example you turn off breakers going to circuits with appliances running and the sound improves (it does) that could be due to the sort of line noise your AI is designed to detect. But then if you also turn off breakers going to circuits with no appliances, no nothing even plugged in, and the sound also improves this cannot be due to back EMF or appliance noise. The only thing I can think of then is RFI. This does happen. I have tested it multiple times, including blind tests where the listener has no idea what is going on, they definitely hear the improvement. (It is not subtle!) 

So curious to know if your work is so specialized it only detects the one and not the other, or can you differentiate? Because yours is the first to be analyzing like this (patent, duh). But at the same time I would like to think that at least some of the designers of conditioners are looking into this, if for no other reason than if you want to eliminate noise it usually helps to know where it is coming from. Because in general the more you know about what you are trying to do the better your chances of actually doing it. If they are studying anything like this, I sure don't recall ever hearing about it.

Sorry cdnorris, it is clear from your post your company is AI focused on identifying and early warning of equipment failure by analyzing the noise these devices put onto the circuit. It is clear you have nothing to do with any audio products and are simply informing us your companies research has identified clear evidence of exactly what many such as myself have been saying for years.

Maybe because I have been saying it for years I am the one who gets it. An awful lot of us still are living in the dark ages where we thought wire is wire, and as long as the wire is thick enough and the voltage high enough all is well. All most certainly is not well. 

Your research is fascinating. People here are always asking things like can my DAC be on the same circuit as my phono stage or amp? Your AI analysis of AC would seem to be capable of answering that question. 

Have you tried using this to compare things like power cords or conditioners, to see if the effectiveness your AI measures correlates with the sound quality improvement we hear?