ERS. The cheapest upgrade known to man?

Steve, I would advise against ferrites, they do have a more than noticeable difference towards 'squashing' the dynamics of a system, quite a few guys have tried them here and removed them soon after, last year at Lilolee's 'House warming party' a few of the group did a ferrite only test in the second display system, didn't take them long suss the problem.
The ERS is well quite unique in dish cloth circles Robbo to nite tried some sheets on top of the transport/dac and psu's to the dac, just layed on top, does it work miricles NO, but it does certain help clean up the mid and upper freq's, vocals/clarity and openiness were improved, not by a Jaw dropping amount , but considering, we wern't using it in it's true intended place, a fair result 4 sheets in total 1 large 3 small. it's also easy to fabicate a desired shape. WM

 

Well I've had an interesting evening waving the AM loop from my tuner around my Marantz 8400 combi player, Linn Ikemi and Linn 5103 processor (and also 2 5125 amps). Nothing conclusive yet because it involved a lot of re-racking and cabling to get the tuner loop near. However I pick up a lot of hash outside the cases, more when the CDs are playing. Roughly speaking there's very little from the Ikemi, quite a lot from the Marantz, a lot from a cheap VCR, a lot from the TV which is sitting right above the amps :-( Don't know about the 5103 because if I turn it off, everything goes quiet ;-)

I read a bit on http://www.svconline.com/ar/avinstall_dealing_rfi/ and I feel more in familiar territory now. The microwave browning dish definitely blocks hash, though whether it affects the treble (or anything else for that matter) I haven't experimented yet. The Mrs watched in amusement. But anyway I re-sited the Marantz away from the 5103 and at the moment the Diana Krall and Norah Jones SACDs sound simply wonderful (I dusted the shelves as well

It may be cheap at $20 a sheet, but not so cheap to accept the susceptibility and all that follows If I put a whole sheet between every component (worst case) I would need 6. And that's without touching cables.

I can see maybe shielding a source of RF at source makes sense (like cans do), but if I wrap it round cables as well, isn't it just doing the same thing as a choke (bad)? Maybe I have a concept problem with shielding vs. filtering.

Anyway, thanks everyone for bringing these things up. I shall get myself at least a sheet to play with (somehow I don't think our local thrift shops will have many browning trays, they're more likely to have a mangle.)

SteveC

 

After our chat about ferrites, I remembered I left a box on the lead from the external power supply to the digital cable TV box, so I removed it...

Bad move, the colours washed away, and image softened...

Put it back, and tried two more on each end of the TV mains lead, again improvement, particularly the PIP image that was soft before, became as crisp as the rest of the screen... :MILD:

The previous test was done regarding only sound quality, I guess in my system ferrites work for video, not for audio, but then the better PCs I use might take care of whatever ferrites do too...