Interesting thing to try.

Ernie

Me
Site Supporter
My local audio dealer, Glenn, at Audio Two, here in my fair city, had a customer who told him about something he read. This customer read an article suggesting using a piece of straight wire as a drain for some type of noise in the power supplied to the component. One thing led to another, and the two of them ended up using two pieces of silver wire, on the case of the electrical panels, in their homes.

"Loosen the front panel screws, just enough to slip the wire under the screws, and tighten the screws, again. leave the wire extended straight out from the panel, and see what, if anything, happens."

Well, I live in a 40-year-old subdivision, with fuses, aluminum wiring, and underground transformers supplying the houses. Power to my house has always been noisy. I have stopped short of getting a power regen device for my stereo, only because my main rig has a custom "Power Pillow" from Gilbert Yeung, at Blue Circle. It was the one that he used at the Plaza, the last year that the Fest was there. Power was terrible, and every exhibitor had problems. Gilbert's device was one of a few that worked well, under very tough conditions.

Still, Glenn thought I should give it a try, and see. So he gave me two pieces of fine silver wire, like something with which you would wire a tonearm. I took it home, and installed it on my fuse panel. I didn't notice any difference on my main system, but I did leave the Blue Circle unit in place. What I did notice was that the television, a Samsung LED screen, cleaned up, and wasn't throwing occasional digital artifacts, any more. Blacks seems darker, as well, but that's tougher to tell. (TV upstairs, panel in the basement.)

In any case, it seemed like a pretty easy thing to try, for a couple of dollars worth of silver wire. Literally, $2.

I don't have a grasp of the effects at work, here. I just know that there was a difference before and after.

For your consideration.

Oh, and Glenn says he has a bunch of this wire.
 
Interesting.. Also running power pillow and several other of Gilbert's plug-in filters. They work great. House and neighborhood are over 80 years old so we have our problems, any thing that helps. Thanks
 
A picture or two would be nice. When you say "electrical panel", do you mean the main breaker box where service enters your house? How long a piece of wire?
 
c.coyle;n34965 said:
A picture or two would be nice. When you say "electrical panel", do you mean the main breaker box where service enters your house? How long a piece of wire?

12" wire, looks like about 30AWG, silver. Yes, where the electrical service enters the house. I would call it a breaker box, if it had them. I have the old screw-in 15-amp fuses.

The wire sticks out, parallel to the wall, from the corners of the panel cover. I tried to take a picture, but the wire is so thin, and lighting so poor, that any shot far enough back to show the scale, causes the wire to be not visible in the picture. I tried a flash, but it doesn't show.

I just loosened the cover screws in two corners of the panel cover, wrapped one end of the wire one time around the screw, and tightened it down. I straightened out the wire, straight out from the box, and that was it.
 
Alright, alright. I dragged out a trouble light, and set it up on the side, and did not use a flash.
 

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By way of context, the black pipes are plastic, and are about two inches behind the wire. The wire only touches the box at the screw. There is another wire, just like this one, on the diagonally-opposite corner.
 
so it's an antenna at DC (or low-frequency AC) ground (which is not necessarily ground to RF)... curious.

I thought the initial post said something about two pieces of wire? I haven't (yet) read through this carefully, though.

My spidey-scientist-senses kick in and lead to a couple-three(testable) questions.

1) What about copper wire or aluminum vs. silver (look up the conductivities of the three metals).
2) What if the gauge of wire were increased (or decreased, for that matter)?
3) What if the orientation of the wire were changed (up, down, 45 degrees)?
 
The panel box is grounded. There is a second piece of wire, diagonally opposite to the first, but I did not picture it, since it looks very similar to the one shown.
  1. Silver is the most conductive of the three.
  2. Glenn said that the other customer, who actually read the article, source unknown to me, said that the proponent of the idea tested these parameters, when used as a drain for a single piece of equipment. He settled on this wire, 30 AWG silver. I don't know if results would be different if the gauge was changed. This is what Glenn had, which he supplied to me.
  3. The plenum for the HVAC prevents more than about 30° if inclination. Glenn said his tests of orientation showed no appreciable difference, when wires and face of box were co-planar. I bent one wire out to be orthogonal to the face of the panel box, and the wire broke off. Probably from the crushing effect of tightening the screw. I re-attached it, flat, and left it.
I offer this purely as anecdotal evidence. Please feel free to try this, and experiment with the variables, and let us know. Maybe some ambitious soul can discover a correlation which permits optimization for various configurations or power challenges.

I did check my other system, which runs without power conditioning of any kind. It has been many weeks since it was turned on, and, to be honest, it was for background music anyway. Sounded good, but I cannot pinpoint any changes, or even that there are any.

YMMV
 
Ground for DC or 60 Hz AC is not necessarily ground for RF -- I am suspecting (wondering) whether the wires are acting as antennae of some sort -- or maybe they are providing an appropriate ground path for RF(I)...

Curious.
 
I couldn't begin to offer an explanation. I just posted my experience. I still believe it would be interesting, for someone more grounded in this technology, to experiment with this idea.
 
Ernie;n35124 said:
I couldn't begin to offer an explanation. I just posted my experience. I still believe it would be interesting, for someone more grounded in this technology, to experiment with this idea.
Heh, I see what you did there... ;- )

In all seriousness, I concur with you. I don't know enough about electronics to have a valid opinion a priori... but there are plenty of folks who do.
 
I know electronics pretty good and really can think of no logical explanation. Some kind of RFI lighting rod effect, or antenna.. Maybe Tin foil will make it even better...



 

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Ernie;n35124 said:
I couldn't begin to offer an explanation. I just posted my experience. I still believe it would be interesting, for someone more grounded in this technology, to experiment with this idea.

Before going for an explanation, whould be interesting to identify the subject.
Ask someone to help you and try to run blind test. If you can correctly identify presents of this wire in more then 50% then explanation will require .
 
Interesting experiment. You know, I've heard of "drain wires" for audio, but never at the fuse box. Typically the wire, just like you have there but much shorter is attached to the negative of the speaker terminal. Some say it works great, some say it picks up FM signal like an antenna. I haven't tried it myself and have only "heard it" in 2 setups, which sounded VERY good. Thanks for sharing your experience.
 
Attaching a wire to the back of an amplifier was the 'jumping off point' for this exercise. Somebody, much more curious than me, started experimenting, and arrived at this point. The tale, and the wire, got passed on to me, since Glenn knew of the power challenges in my area. I figured that I had virtually no money in this, so, why not?

Regarding the blind test, my wife was watching tv, and, unbeknownst to her, I went downstairs and removed the wires. "What did you just do?", I heard from upstairs. I put the wire back. "Never mind, it's fixed."

So, I guess the wire stays.
 
Glenn said he had a half a spool of the wire. If you are curious, and don't know how to contact him, he's at Audio Two, in Windsor.
 
Come on Ernie, this makes no logical sense and I'm sure there is lots of science that can be used to call BS on this...which is precisely why I have to try it. :)

The times are still fresh in my mind when you and I sat down to 'listen' to a few things that didn't satisfy my logical mind, only to have my hard-ass BS meter pretty radically re-set. A wire hanging off my breaker panel? What the hell, I'm in - can I grab any thin ga. stuff out of my parts boxes or does Glen say it's supposed to be this silver stuff?
 
Yours was the post I have been waiting for, Bill. I, too, remember well a certain early-morning listening session, where a friend handed both our BS meters to us on rather inexpensive platters. It was that very experience which stayed my impulse to tell Glenn that he was full of shit, Glenn and Brian both having been cut from the same bolt of cloth. So I tried it.

I'll go see Glenn tomorrow, and get you some of this, and mail it to you. It looks, for all the world, like silver tonearm wire. I'll ask him if he has gone any further with exploring variables. I'm just too lazy, no, that's not the word... BUSY! That's the word. Too busy to play around with this. I don't watch enough TV to get motivated.

Bill, I don't know how your hydro is, but here, it's pretty crappy, and aluminum wiring on top of that. Anyway, watch the mail, next week.
 
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