The electrical cure

ANALOG CORNER

- MICHAEL FREMER

Rex Hungerford, Edward DeVito, and Craig Bradley rode into town last week and, together with Audioquest’s Garth Powell, solved all the electrical problems that have plagued my audio system for years.Garth Powell, a name familiar to many Stereophile readers, is AudioQuest’s electricity guru and designer of the Niagara series of power conditioners; he is also responsible for the company’s line of AC and signal cables. Bradley is a local electrician and audio enthusiast who has done electrical work for me in the past, including replacing dedicated lines—one for the low-power signal components and another for the amplifiers—with a single line, hoping that might solve years of annoying ground hum and other noise issues. You’d think the ground potential would be almost nothing between two sets of adjacent AC jacks on the same circuit, but the ground potential between the jacks remained unusually high, and the hum wasn’t gone.

I had tried many times to troubleshoot and fix my ground-loop problem; once, I even sought help from a highly regarded New York City studiotech wizard. But I had put the problem on hold until, for reasons unrelated to audio performance, I installed a backup generator.1 The transfer switch inserted in the line damaged the sound to the point where reviewing audio equipment would have been impossible. It was, as Powell described it, the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Two PS Audio Power Plant AC regenerators got me through, a P15 and a P20—many thanks to PS Audio for the loan. But the regenerators merely masked the problem; I needed a “ground up” solution, no pun intended.