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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: It’s mad, mad, mad... electricity.

Post Subject: Unintended consequencesPosted by steverino on: 12/10/2011

Paul S says Still, who knows what sort of problems would yet get to the hi-fi via such a line.

You raise a very interesting point. If the grid line were known pure than it would be highly likely that a consistent and significant benefit would be found from tapping it directly. However if the grid line has certain kinds of distortion (which seem to be increasing yearly) then receiving the "untouched" input from it can raise problems that would be different from tapping an internal line with other circuits on it. The other circuits overlay whatever "impurities" each generates on top of the distortions that come in through the grid line. By doing that (as long as they are not too severe themselves iike dimmers) they tend to randomly smooth out the peaks and valleys. Once that mixed signal hits the Pure Power inputs it will look different I assume than the direct line from the grid would look. If the grid line has more asymmetric distortion I wonder if AC regenerators would be more, or at least differently, affected by that input. For example if we draw a thin black line through a painting it ruins it for everyone. If we were however to spread that black line evenly through the entire painting it would register as an insignificant dulling of the sheen.

Its unfortunate that we can't run the grid line through a vacuum tube. I've long felt that one of the advantages of well designed vacuum tube amplification is that it filters out a lot of grunge from the signal path compared with transistors..

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