Weekly Q&A: Answers | Week of November 6, 2023

Prying Open Pandora's Box on Power Transmission...

Q: If you are using a StromTank or other power conditioner are your power cords of little or no concern? Similarly, are ground connection boxes of less relevance? It seems that this may be a "belt and suspenders" approach to electrical interference but I remain confused. is all digital, and to a lesser extent analogue, equipment generating high frequency radiation that can be mitigated by grounding boxes? Are all AC power cords emitting electrical contamination that can be mitigated by the use of higher quality (and expensive) power cords? Ok, you get clean power from the StromTank, but you still need to address the other electrical contamination floating about. Have I got that right?

- John

A: This is a great question and sums up some of the confusion many of us have about power transmission (and analogously signal transmission). It may help to break this down into possible sources of power problems:

1. Noise coming into the audio system at, let’s say, the wall outlet from the power company