Mains conditioning

One of the troubles with making your own HiFi components is that there always seems to be another small improvement that can be made, just to get it to the next level !

Peter when you refer to noise and spikes do you mean clicks/pops? Also are these audible on everything or just certain sources?

I have tried mains purifiers in the past and sold them on as I could not tell any meaningful differences.

Cannot comment on spike/surge protection though my power block does have some protection.

As outlined above, feeding a separate mains fed from an independent consumer unit certainly should help the overall sound, but how much it will impact on spikes and other interference it will depend on where this is coming from, I suspect not a great deal personally. I used 10mm twin and earth for my dedicated mains spur.

Have a look at the PSU circuit diagrams for your DIY amps and check if there are any snubbing capacitors across the rectifier diodes (the ones connected between your mains transformer and the big smoothing capacitors (the unregulated dc before the regulators). Without these, the transients as the rectifiers turn on/off on each mains half-cycle generate nasty spikes which may be your problem. Something like 47nF ceramic discs capacitors in parallel with each of these rectifier diodes should help eliminate the problem.

That 100Hz stuff is the transients from the rectifiers (see my previous post).

PS - don't forget there's a Genera sitting here you can try out. PM me.

Edited by gwebster - 04 Mar 2017 at 5:19pm