Analog Corner

My heart did not attack me. My arteries aren't clogged. I'm awaiting an electrical bypass to save my audio system's life.

As I reported last month, my audio system started choking on the house juice immediately upon power up after an emergency power generator was installed in my house. The system isn't running on generator power, but the generator's installation required installing some other hardware in the AC signal path: a switch that automatically transfers the house's power system to the generator when the power goes out. It's that new hardware that seems to be causing the problem.

Before the generator was installed, the sound had been better—more intense and emotionally elevating—than any that I've heard in the almost 22 years I've been in this room. I'd leave the room late every evening laughing, literally vibrating and shaking my head in wonder. I'm not kidding!

I know this sounds like reviewer bullshit, but I'm not stepping in it when I write that every familiar recording I played was like hearing for the first time what was really on the record. Synapse-embedded expectations were consistently shattered. Meaning flooded in as formerly disparate musical threads connected.

Even unsophisticated, raw recordings like The Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons (UK Decca SKL 4852) became a new experience. I now perceived that songs like "Complicated," sewn into my DNA after 55 years of listening, were far more complicated, especially microdynamically and texturally, than I'd previously realized. The fuzz bass on that track shot through me like a drill bit. Charlie's tom hits became massive, splattered thwacks, each more insistent than the previous one.

Recordings I knew were astonishing became even more so. From the day in 1968 when I first played The Moody Blues's Days of Future Past (UK Deram SML 707), I knew the music was arch and pretentious—and the Technicolor sound almost unbearably beautiful, spread across a Cinerama stage. That group—then best known for its cover of Bessie Banks's "Go Now!"—had gone into the studio to record a hi-fi demo disc for Decca's new Deramic ("Decca Panoramic") process, which the label's engineers promised would "allow for more space between instruments, rendering these sounds softer to the ear"—Boy, howdy, did it ever, although not as much on the American pressing.

What I heard on that spectacular pre-generator system was doubly clarified spatially and through the roof timbrally—a much-improved version of a confirmed sonic spectacular. How can anyone sit through a record they've heard for 53 years for 40 minutes going "Wow!," again and again? I don't know how, but that's what I did.

I remember buying that record while home from college for spring break. I'd picked it up at Sam Goody's, because I'd been attracted to the cover art. I bought two other records that day: Steppenwolf's foil-wrapped debut and Blood, Sweat & Tears's Child Is Father to the Man. (Can you remember what you added to your streaming library last week?)

Weeks of eager listening, asking, "Okay, what will that now sound like?" ended when the electricity came back on after the generator installation. I expected nothing to change—why would it? But it did. It had.

Everything good was gone. Transparency: gone. Vivid three-dimensionality: gone. Black backgrounds: gone. Precisely drawn images: gone. Two large, ill-focused boomboxes had replaced absolute magic. The sound was so diffuse, unorganized, and cloudy that I couldn't listen comfortably other than as background filler.

Last column, I went into a few possible explanations of why a transfer switch used to shunt electricity between the street and my listening room might have caused the sonic deterioration. As I wrote there, AudioQuest's Garth Powell (designer of the company's Niagara power conditioners) told me I wasn't imagining things—that he gets calls and emails all the time from distraught customers who have installed generators or decided solar would produce better sound, but it didn't. Some of it had to do with induced noise on the AC line and the blockage of RF noise attempting to return to earth ground.

One industry associate, trying to be helpful, told me to buy a $150 Trifield Line EMI monitor. Just plug it in and the built-in speaker and visual meter will tell you about the noise on your line. The meter, though, didn't read much noise. I asked Powell: Why? Because it's "cheap, inaccurate, covers less than 4 octaves of only one of three induced-noise modes. Its 10-cent switching supply adds nearly as much noise as it often detects....Doing this for real starts at about $8000 for a portable meter." Oh.

I'm still waiting for the bypass to be installed that will route "the street" electricity directly to a new breaker panel that will serve my audio system, bypassing the switch. (I won't be able to use my system when the power is out, but I can live with that.) Meanwhile, were it not for PS Audio's regenerators, I'd be out of business until the bypass happens, which, the electrical contractor told me, will not be anytime soon. They've got generators to install, and in their eyes my problem is hardly an emergency. To me, yes, to them, no.

PS Audio's DirectStream Power Plant 20 AC Regenerator
Jim Austin reviewed this $9999 piece in Stereophile a few years ago. Please read his buttoned-down review—the cautious one you'd expect a scientist to write (footnote 1). There's no point in repeating his description of the product and the technology it employs. After you've read it, read the comments. My favorite is, "A really good amp should not be affected by mains quality at all, or at least as little as possible." So glad this reader was paying attention to what Jim wrote.

I live in a single-family suburban house, not in a city-dweller apartment as does Jim. My electrical service is the first one off the transformer across the street. Whether or not that is a major advantage, I do not know, but it can't hurt. It seems to me I've got "good power"—or did, until the transfer switch installation.

I have had some odd ground-noise issues here over the years. An amplifier I once reviewed, and then bought, developed an annoying grounding-related buzz that no one could diagnose and eliminate—not even a studio-tech guru I imported from New York City. Eventually I gave up and sold the amp, telling the buyer that if he had the buzz problem, I'd take it back and refund his money. He heard nothing but dead silence (and the music the amp produced) and was very happy with his purchase.

I had an electrician friend completely rewire my room's dedicated line, adding 20 amp service. He also pounded a grounding rod into the flowerbed outside my office. Since then, I've heard no buzzing (except when the window's open and there's a bee in that garden outside), but when I used high-quality power conditioners, I could still hear an improvement, blacker backgrounds in particular. Over the last few years I've utilized Shunyata's Hydra and Triton conditioners, and more recently I've used the AudioQuest Niagara 7000, all with good results. A few months ago I added the Computer Audio Design (CAD) Ground Control products, which brought another level of quiet and some other improvements.