Clean Power matters

[Cohibaman]

I recently developed (and since solved) a mysterious issue I had with my system.

I started hearing intermittent bursts of hiss from either my speakers or subs. Because it was so intermittent, I couldn’t pin it down.

Then one listening session, between tracks, I noticed the meter needles on my McIntosh amps bouncing off of zero. I did some troubleshooting and it initially looked like it was either my C2300 preamp or JL Audio CR-1 crossover. I quickly ruled both out as the culprits after I removed the cables from the amps. Even with the interconnects disconnected, the needles were dancing. Very strange!

Flash back about 2 months ago, I noticed my Noise Harvesters were going absolutely crazy, nearly constantly lit up. Because I’ve been traveling a lot lately, I didn’t pay too much attention though - big mistake!

Well, yesterday I decided to figure out what was causing the Noise Harvesters to look like a runway at JFK. Turns out it is a noisy UPS I recently installed for my fish tank. Once I unplugged the UPS, all Harvesters went dark. Sure enough, the needles were now normal and stuck at zero - no more bouncing.

Two takeaways;

1) The Noise Harvesters work! They were just overwhelmed by either the type and/or amplitude of the noise. But as I said in other posts about them, for me they are a tool. They visually alert me of line noise and help me seek out the root cause of the noise.

2) Clean power is a must! The noise coming from the UPS was on a completely different circuit. Yet it still polluted other circuits. Further, as good as the power supply of the McIntosh amp is, the noise still got through all its filtration to the point it became audible.

Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to do with my UPS.