Keep noise creators outside your clean power zone


Hi Everyone,

Just a tip for those of you who have invested in power conditioners:

Keep things which generate noise outside of your clean zone.

Power conditioners, unless fully active, are just filters. They are not magic blessing devices. What I mean is that the power that comes in gets filtered, and sent out, but it can be contaminated again! It’s just like your water supply. Makes no sense to use fancy water filters, and storing it in a dirty bucket.

If you can, avoid using wall warts, and network devices like Wifi routers, switches, video streamers etc. on the clean side of your conditioner because they will contaminate the already filtered power. If you have a conditioner with multiple zones, put all your noisy neighbors on the same dirty zone.

I try to solve this by using a less expensive but still very good power strip to create a "de-militarized zone." DMZ for short. The Furman PST-8 is a great way to do this, because it does include really good filtering which goes down to about 3 kHz.

Plug it directly into the wall, not into your conditioner. This will give you the most number of filters between your wall warts and your audio. Of course, other alternatives are to use linear power supplies exclusively, but even then, anything with a network or CPU in it can generate noise that makes it through the power supply.

Lots of other conditioners will work, of course, the Furman with SMP just has great noise handling and ~ $120 is much more affordable than alternatives.

Whatever you do, keep your noisy neighbors outside your clean zone.

Best,

E
erik_squires
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I agree to a certain extent....for instance moving my router 10 feet away from my rack made a huge difference.  The problem is you can't keep your audio components outside of your "clean" zone.  So much of the noise that is generated is coming straight from your gear itself.....toroidal transformers etc...  Isolation helps and rack placement can be very important in some instances...for me it was lengthy trial and error to find a quiet spot for my SUT.  
Good advice @erik_squires 

For this audio-dilletante, your setup makes sense. 

Thank you for sharing it. 
How do you keep your wife out of the house? Actually I must lead a bless life. I don't have any noise problems. Quiet as a mouse.