Yesterday I had an opportunity to work on an interesting project – trying to improve the electricity to my stereo to improve the sound. I’d been putting this particular project off for a while, why I’m not exactly sure. Maybe I had some skepticism? In any case, given the outcome, I wish I’d done it a heck of a lot sooner.

Anything worth doing in audio takes some time. This took surprisingly little as audio projects go, and without even completing the first phase of this project, all I can say is, WOW!

Below is a breakdown of how my electrical system is configured, what I did to improve it and the impact it had on the sound of my system. But before we start, PLEASE! Fasten your seatbelt firmly and tightly across your waist.

The home my wife and I share here in Marin City, California is sort of a duplex. We live in the main house upstairs, and we have a 2 bedroom downstairs unit added about 20 years ago that serves as the workspace for our healing arts business. The downstairs unit is also home to my beloved listening room, formerly our one car garage.

There is a main electrical panel upstairs, just outside our front door, a weird place I realize, but you see that door used to be a window on the side of the house that used to be just an exterior wall before the window was added. The original front door used to be around the corner from the panel, but now that door is a fireplace and what was the window I mentioned is now our front door with the electrical panel sitting next to it. Needless to say this house has seen a lot of changes since it was originally built in the late 60s.

Anyway, there is a 200 amp breaker in this main panel that feeds a subpanel that serves as the main panel for the downstairs unit. My stereo has a dedicated circuit on this subpanel with 3 outlets on that circuit, only 2 of which I’m using at the moment.

I do most of my listening when my wife and I are not working, and nearly all of my serious listening on weekends when we aren’t using the downstairs unit at all. There are only a few appliances or other electrically powered devices in use down there, including a washer, dryer, computer printer and a stove we never use but is difficult to unplug. There is a refrigerator down there but it’s never plugged in and we have no microwave at all.

My thinking was to try to limit my system’s exposure to the other devices drawing power from the subpanel first. I honestly have no idea if this approach represents any clear understanding of how electricity works and affects the sound of a stereo. It was merely an approach that, based on my very limited understanding, seemed to make sense.

Once I had my system playing for a while, after I had used my Talisman on it and I’d confirmed that it was sounding right with my current favorite test record, I walked out into the hallway from my listening room and unplugged the washing machine. Then I went back and played the same section of the record I’d just been playing.

There was a clear and substantial improvement in the size of the soundstage and the transparency within it. Instruments on the right side of the soundstage now extended further to the right, and likewise to the left. Not only that, the instruments appeared bigger, clearer and better defined.

And let me make this next point perfectly clear.

This difference was NOT subtle. It was very obviously better.

Next I went down the hall and turned off and unplugged the printer. Then I went back and played more of my test record, a very, very special copy of a very special recording of Bizet’s Carmen Ballet performed by The Bolshoi Theater Orchestra. It sounded EVEN better! Still bigger, and more open with the strings sounding sweeter and more musical.

This is a record that is very tough to get to sound right. The music regularly swings from very soft subtle passages to very loud ones where the orchestra comes up quickly and with great intensity. With the washing machine, and now the printer off and unplugged, these passages started to come together in ways I’d not experienced before.

I decided it was time to move on from Bizet’s Carmen and play some other records. My “RL” cut of Led Zeppelin 2, which always sounds enormous, sounded GARGANTUAN!

Next I walked out of my listening room, out of the lower unit and up around the side of the house to the main electrical panel where I proceeded to switch off the breaker to our washer and dryer in the main house. Then I headed back downstairs to play my Zep 2 again.

Not only was it even bigger, and even more open, but the sound had gotten still more transparent. I could hear the emotion in Robert Plant’s voice, and could make him out center right with more height, width and depth, and with a good deal more studio space around him.

I lifted the tonearm and I went back up the main panel and switched off the breaker for our Toto Washlet toilet seat (how did I ever live without one of these?). Then I went back downstairs and put my Zep 2 back on.

Incredibly, it sounded even better.

Then, with eager anticipation, I went back upstairs and went for the low hanging fruit. I switched off the breaker to our refrigerator and headed back downstairs.

Holy Toe-ledo! Man oh MAN! This was some CRAZY ASS S_ _ T!

I decided to put on my best copy of The Stones Sticky Fingers, and played the track “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

The kick of the drums was BEYOND beyond! The bass SUBTERRANEAN! And the guitar was positively RIPPING! But what really got my attention was the living, breathing Mick Jagger standing in front of me. And I’m not talking Jagger’s mouth next to the microphone, or even his head, but the entirety of the man, torso, legs and the whole kit and caboodle. I had never heard the vocal track on that record sound anything like that before. It was nothing short of a revelation.

If you’ve been to my site before and read some of my articles, particularly some of the older ones, you may already know I sometimes get a little too liberal with ALL CAPS and exclamation marks. I’d be the first to admit I can get pretty excited about this hobby, and perhaps a bit carried away at times sharing my experiences with my readers.

But I’ve got to tell you, I am not exaggerating here in the least. Besides the system at Better Records, which I had the unique opportunity to hear a couple of years ago, I have never heard an audio system as transparent and open sounding, not to mention tonally accurate from top to bottom, as mine. But this sound, the sound I was hearing now coming out of my speakers, this was HEAD EXPLODING!

I suspended my project at that point and just started playing record after record, hearing every last one of them like I was hearing it for the very first time. Maybe if I’d switched off a few more breakers it could have sounded even better? Certainly the evidence up to the point indicated as much.

But you know, I kinda felt like I didn’t want to get too greedy. And as silly as that might sound, it’s the God’s honest truth. Instead of going for even more of this crazy, crazy good sound, I decided it was time to sit down and just enjoy the music. And I gotta tell you, I wasn’t just enjoying it. I was in dog-gone analog audio heaven!

If anyone could build a power conditioner that could do what I’d just done to improve the sound of my system, I expect they could sell an awful lot of them for an awful lot of money. I haven’t used a lot of power conditioners, but the ones I have used only made my stereo sound worse. As one audio salesman put it to me – “the best of them are just a place to plug in your stuff that doesn’t suck.”

I’ve no doubt some of you will know more about electricity and how it affects audio systems than I do. I will look forward to your comments, and I expect some of you will have some very rational explanations for how this all works. To be perfectly honest, I really don’t care how it works, just that it does.

Tom told me that when Better Records was operating out of his home, he had a fan in one room that, when left on, improved the sound of his stereo. The same was true for a printer in his office. I suppose this means I’ve now got to try going around and turning things on instead of off. Leave it to Tom Port to have an outsized influence on how I spend my “free” time.

But I’ll be darned if the guy isn’t right on the money every single time. I thought switching off a few breakers might help a bit, and maybe even make a pretty significant difference. But I certainly never expected to have the sound of my system catapulted into the stratosphere.

I think it’s only fair to point out that the dramatic improvements I got changing the electricity to my audio system are more than likely a culmination of a number of different steps I’ve taken to improve resolution from top to bottom.

Unless you’re using a Triplanar tonearm and an EAR 324, your turntable is sitting on a Townshend Seismic platter, not to mention your amp, and you’ve spent the time I have dialing in everything from your turntable setup to your speaker placement to your wire configuration (not to mention my new custom built turntable table! More later), I’m not sure you’d get anywhere near the results I have. In fact, I’m pretty confident you wouldn’t.

But rest assured, by taking one carefully placed step at a time, you can make some GIANT leaps forward in this hobby. Take it from me, your system can sound SO much better than you ever imagined, and WAY better than the vast majority of audio systems out there.

Welcome to the analog REVOLUTION!