external power transformers?

not sure if this goes here or elsewhere so, mods please move if necessary.

Was at an audio gathering last night, one of the engineers was swearing that he removed all the power transformers from his commercial built units(Avalon, etc, etc) so that they were all external. He described it as moving them into the wall.  based on his description, I can only assume that he actually placed all the transformers in the wall vs removing them and mounting them into an external chassis. He was swearing how it made all the difference in the world.  Saying how everything  is quieter and all the gear has less noise.    Anyone care to comment.  I see pros and cons to this approach.  But to me seems very excessive for little benefit....

Sounds like a studio fire waiting to happen.  :

Properly designed gear should not have hum problems from their own transformers.

While I recall some old school heavy iron EI power amp transformers that would make rack mount gear hum several spaces away. 

JR

I suppose if you moved them all to an enclosure of sorts it could cut down on hum given a proper metal enclosure, but it sounds like a wiring nightmare and depending on the distance to respective gear it seems adding the extra wire would affect something...maybe if the distance was pretty short it would be neg,igible, but that almost seems like a lot of work for very little payback...I suspect the hum issues might have been related to improper grounding of the gear into a patch bay or something...I dunno...Like Jon said it sounds like a fire in the wings or at minimum degrading the life of a tranx by adding extra resistance wire length and keeping them in a non-ventilated space...heat kills more gear than hum.

only hum issues I ever had in a unit was fixed by rotating the power transformer just a little bit. 

I would be worried about the fire thing as well. thank god it's not my place...

What commercial gear has hum issues to begin with these days?  I've done work in a few different studios and have used a lot of gear and I can't remember ever having a problem with hum disturbing the recordings, save for instances of ground loops.  Seems like some guys love to find exotic solutions to problems that don't exist.

Bowie said:

What commercial gear has hum issues to begin with these days?  I've done work in a few different studios and have used a lot of gear and I can't remember ever having a problem with hum disturbing the recordings, save for instances of ground loops.  Seems like some guys love to find exotic solutions to problems that don't exist.

Click to expand...

These are some of the same guys who pay $1000 for a special line cord. 

Remounting the power transformers externally may make some tiny incremental improvement to the noise floor of a marginal product design, but is unsafe unless you are well aware of UL safety practices for mains wiring spacing and insulation standards inside gear and follow them rigorously. 

So not only do you put yourself and others at risk, what does this do to the resale value of your gear?

Just say no mas...

JR

just 1000US? I have seen one at 4000US 

I have a photo of inside a 12,000.00(USD) speaker cable if anyone is interested in seeing it.

Let's see it!!

pucho812 said:

I have a photo of inside a 12,000.00(USD) speaker cable if anyone is interested in seeing it.

Click to expand...

+1!

the boys at a certain speaker manufacture really know how to party. An audiophile speaker wire company sends them a sample and they get into the details by cutting it in half after given it a good audio listen.... So here goes...

pucho812 said:

the boys at a certain speaker manufacture really know how to party. An audiophile speaker wire company sends them a sample and they get into the details by cutting it in half after given it a good audio listen.... So here goes...

Click to expand...

LOLOL

Nice one ,
so High quality speaker wire needs a lot of air in the middle!

This particular cable is made up of 4 twisted pairs.  That give two red leads and two black leads.  I am sure there is some theoretical reason for it but to me it's just an excuse to charge more for a cable. 

I doesn't even look like very good wire. Looks like regular THHN primary wire like you get at Lowes or Home Depot. I'd at least expected silver.

The rest looks like garden hose and what are those, teflon rods? Thanks for posting! Not what I expected.

So um,.. how did it "sound"?

hymentoptera said:

I doesn't even look like very good wire. Looks like regular THHN primary wire like you get at Lowes or Home Depot. I'd at least expected silver.

The rest looks like garden hose and what are those, teflon rods? Thanks for posting! Not what I expected.

So um,.. how did it "sound"?

Click to expand...

the teflon rods are there again to space things out. I am sure there is some theory behind it but for the life of me I can't think of it nor can I spin it.
As for how it sounded, hmmmmmm well lets put it this way, I have heard way less expensive cable that sounded as good.

hymentoptera said:

The rest looks like garden hose and what are those, teflon rods? Thanks for posting! Not what I expected.

Click to expand...

  You know how a subwoofer has a port so that the pressure has a way to escape?  This is a port so that the excess BS can escape.  When you're dealing w/ a $12,000 cable you need a port as quite a bit of BS can build up.

Teflon Rods give you a wider stereo field, improve and tighen the bass response,  Have silky highs and puchy mids.

But be aware that the rods need to be in pairs,  orherwise the sound is thinn and sterile.

For any confused about speaker wire, it's the resistance 20hz to 20kHz that matters. Funny wire is often based on some obscure theory/phenomenon that rarely has significant affect within the audio frequency bandpass.

I debunked funny speaker wire in my old "Audio Mythology" column back in the 1980s, but the stronger audio myths refuse to die.  As usual there is a real scientific theory to support marketing to consumers who lack the judgment to hold the claims in proper perspective. In fact consumers are often hungry for such magical solutions. 

Beside me, there was a more authoritative AES journal paper back then (Prof Greiner?), and even the mainstream audio  magazines wrote conservative speaker wire articles. The audio-phool rags weren't going to kill their pet golden goose, while most blind or double blind listening tests revealed that the emperor's new clothes were indeed missing. 

JR

PS: I recall one old oddball suggestion to use 300 ohm twin lead antenna wire for speakers, I suspect they heard the relatively higher DCR of such wire interacting with their speaker's impedance curve. 

Going to back to Xfmr hum, I think it's VERY common for power transformers to produce an acoustic hum,
sometimes tightening the bells or lams together can help or adding some dampening material to it and the enclosure
an enclosed rack helps but offset by the number of fans in things these days ,  few companies spend the money to make things quiet [ cause that costs more money ]

James randi through his foundation,  one million dollar paranormal challenge, has offered one million dollars  to anyone who can demonstrate that expensive audio cables are any better then regular audio cables.

No one has taken him up on the offer, even the audiophool guys.