After advice on buying a Balanced Mains Unit or Mains Conditioning kit.

The Celtic connection. Nice. Friend of my fathers retired to Brittany. Taught French and German and was the official WRU interpreter for the French games. Been gone a long time now.
 
..Thems fighting words!!!. No I like the French system, .. and have rewired a house (in France ) with their standards. Give me a good spur network and plenty of circuit breakers to a ring main anytime.
Ah, but the beauty of a ring is that it keeps on working if you have a fault in one part of it - and you might not have to worry about it until the house burns down... Er, yes, I think the UK ring system is well past its sell-by date, being introduced really just to save wire.
 
Except when a ring gets broken it effectively becomes two radial circuits and then the cable potentially becomes under-rated and a fire risk.
 
The weather is too English there :D
 
The weather is too English there :D
Actually very very Irish . On a good day it is like the best Sunny Day in Kerry on Steroids, and when it rains, its like that on steroids as well. Even the hedgerow plants are familiar, and cattle in fields.
 
So I finally went for the IsoTek Evo 3 Aquarius. It arrives this week.
 
These people actually build balanced transformers.


They are ugly and heavy but do work.

I have audio using large electrostatic speakers and a DAC with 0.00004 % THD+N.

Yes I can hear a difference.

A BMU will not remove DC off the mains so I have a DIY DC blocker before the BMU.
 
So I finally went for the IsoTek Evo 3 Aquarius. It arrives this week.
So you asked people’s opinions and overwhelmingly the answer was, it is largely unnecessary and expensive. - but you are going ahead anyway.
Let us know if it works for you.
 
Well I knew I would open a can of worms but I had hoped to have had some feedback of people who have tried such things instead all I got was feedback from people who think it’s all snake oil.

I will give my feedback though. It may be that you’re all right and I regret my purchase but from all the reading I’ve been doing about how noise on our mains is now from wi fi, always on electrical devices and mobile signals I am doubting it. This product has won numerous awards.
 
Russ Andrews and similar gear is a standing insult to any engineer who ever designed the power supply for a half-decent piece of HiFi equipment.

And - if anything Russ Andrews or their ilk provide has any merit at all - a rather incongruous vote for the workaday sparkies who did the entire house wiring back to the incoming connection from the mains, which their magic devices entirely rely on to provide a supply whose defects they can rectify in the last couple of feet, instead of going back to the root of the ‘issues’ they claim to deal with.

Basically, they are selling wolf tickets.
 
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Russ Andrews and similar gear is a standing insult to any engineer who ever designed the power supply for a half-decent piece of HiFi equipment.

And - if anything Russ Andrews or their ilk provide has any merit at all - a rather incongruous vote for the workaday sparkles who did the entire house wiring back to the incoming connection from the mains, which their magic devices entirely rely on to provide a supply whose defects they can rectify in the last couple of feet, instead of going back to the root of the ‘issues’ they claim to deal with.

Basically, they are selling wolf tickets.
Russ Andrews is another company I buy from and I love their products as well. In this case I have gone with IsoTek because it ticks more boxes for what I want.
 
Russ Andrews is another company I buy from and I love their products as well. In this case I have gone with IsoTek because it ticks more boxes for what I want.
Says it all really :facepalm: :facepalm:
 
Switched mode power supplies and led lighting chuck plenty of high order harmonics onto the mains supplies. These tend to alter things like the power factor correction and in a 3 phase system neutral loading. Filtering these out requires large and expensive passive filters and no domestic mains strip is going to manage that.

Back in early 90s I was working as an analogue design engineer on high speed cassette copiers. These got shipped all over the world and to ensure they would work on any provided supply we used to test them on a variety of "dirty" mains sources including generators, ups, isolation transformers and harmonic generators that used badly wound transformers to create electrical noise. I can confirm that quite subtle changes can occur when connecting audio equipment to ropey supplies. I would describe this as an increase in the noise floor and audible "thickening" and distortion of the sound. Sticking a 'scope on the power supply, the regulation tends to go out of the window and the increased ripple decreases the smoothing effect of capacitors. Anything with a linear power supply will be worse affected, as the transformer tends to act as a big inductor in a tuned circuit and creates quite measurable transient spikes when using an Electromagnetic probe.

As I said however, removing this clutter is quite hard to do and requires high current tunable filtering. I would seriously doubt if any consumer level equipment has the ability to do so.

Wifi, 4/5g and other low power radio signals will not affect a mains supply. You need a high current source of interference to produce any measurable effect.
 
Switched mode power supplies and led lighting chuck plenty of high order harmonics onto the mains supplies. These tend to alter things like the power factor correction and in a 3 phase system neutral loading. Filtering these out requires large and expensive passive filters and no domestic mains strip is going to manage that.

Back in early 90s I was working as an analogue design engineer on high speed cassette copiers. These got shipped all over the world and to ensure they would work on any provided supply we used to test them on a variety of "dirty" mains sources including generators, ups, isolation transformers and harmonic generators that used badly wound transformers to create electrical noise. I can confirm that quite subtle changes can occur when connecting audio equipment to ropey supplies. I would describe this as an increase in the noise floor and audible "thickening" and distortion of the sound. Sticking a 'scope on the power supply, the regulation tends to go out of the window and the increased ripple decreases the smoothing effect of capacitors. Anything with a linear power supply will be worse affected, as the transformer tends to act as a big inductor in a tuned circuit and creates quite measurable transient spikes when using an Electromagnetic probe.

As I said however, removing this clutter is quite hard to do and requires high current tunable filtering. I would seriously doubt if any consumer level equipment has the ability to do so.

Wifi, 4/5g and other low power radio signals will not affect a mains supply. You need a high current source of interference to produce any measurable effect.

Might I ask your experience on hi w might one of these things work in removing the hash provided so cheerfully by SM supplies and what not?

Assuming of course there’s nothing of that type plugged into them.


They don’t seem large enough to provide a clean, separated supply especially as, so far as I understand them, they don’t isolate from the main house earth... though they do claim quite fearlessly to provide a stead 230V untouched by the mains voltage.
 
Switched mode power supplies and led lighting chuck plenty of high order harmonics onto the mains supplies. These tend to alter things like the power factor correction and in a 3 phase system neutral loading. Filtering these out requires large and expensive passive filters and no domestic mains strip is going to manage that.

Back in early 90s I was working as an analogue design engineer on high speed cassette copiers. These got shipped all over the world and to ensure they would work on any provided supply we used to test them on a variety of "dirty" mains sources including generators, ups, isolation transformers and harmonic generators that used badly wound transformers to create electrical noise. I can confirm that quite subtle changes can occur when connecting audio equipment to ropey supplies. I would describe this as an increase in the noise floor and audible "thickening" and distortion of the sound. Sticking a 'scope on the power supply, the regulation tends to go out of the window and the increased ripple decreases the smoothing effect of capacitors. Anything with a linear power supply will be worse affected, as the transformer tends to act as a big inductor in a tuned circuit and creates quite measurable transient spikes when using an Electromagnetic probe.

As I said however, removing this clutter is quite hard to do and requires high current tunable filtering. I would seriously doubt if any consumer level equipment has the ability to do so.

Wifi, 4/5g and other low power radio signals will not affect a mains supply. You need a high current source of interference to produce any measurable effect.
Well I’ll find out this week. It arrives Wednesday.
 
Well I’ll find out this week. It arrives Wednesday.
When you install it don't forget to switch off the 'Expectation Bias' :smashin:
 
From experience the only thing I have that works is a dedicated main spur for the audio in the music room.
 
Will do. I will also ensure I plug in my expensive Russ Andrews power leads as well.
That will just switch it back on though
 

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