mains regenerators

As my mains is utter rubbish I've been looking at commercial stuff and its damn expensive . I was thinking along the line of using a sealed lead acid battery on a timed overnight charger which feeds a large dc/ac inverter during the day . I have done lots of backup systems before but not for my hifi . Has anyone tried anything like this before ?

 

Yes, and it's unlikely to be any sort of upgrade. Even the 'pure sine' inverters are really just bad approximations to a sine, so the output is usually rather more noisy as the mains

I've built several iterations of a regenerator to test a few ideas - if you're interested I posted a brief sumamry of findings here: http://www.acoustica.org.uk/other/mains_regen.html

 

In what way is your mains "utter rubbish"? Is it a weak net and/or are there any heavy loads nearby?

 

lead acids can be noisy too ....all those bubbles I jest not.

Why not contact Mr Rusby of Lynwood electronics....he does a mean conditioner.

coaley lane farm wentworth

someone must have a phone number or try 118118

 

by utter rubb I mesn an nominal voltage of 215-220 with outages of 20% or more. I tried a voltage stabiliser to start with but all this did was to show how much the mains was jumping. I suppose a ups might be one way forward but I favour a battery driven system as in theory i can have a cleaner supply all of my playing times. I have asked shunyata etc and whilst they can take out spikes brown outs are a different matter .

 

Mains boxes like those made by Isotek for example are tempting, especially when you think that the power is in a sense the very front end of your system. However, its one of these things you just can't tell if your mains needs it till you try it and my big problem with them is the price. I actually have a big problem with price generally in the hifi world and frankly its a lot of bull shit that prices need to be as high as they are. I believe they could sell more to the vast majority of the public who presently will have nothing to do with it, and make money, possible more money. Lets take a £500 mains box from Isotek, okay what's in it? £500 ? Lets look at a well specced German made washer/drier with all its materials, precision moving parts, electronics, back-up, marketing and distribution expenses, for similar money. Even factoring in the fact that one is specialist and the other mass market, I still think it is bull's plops. Same goes for things like expensive pre-amplifiers. I ask myself, if simple signal paths and lack of features is held to promote great sound, what the hell is inside just such a pre-amp to justify being the same as the matching power amp , let alone the silly prices overall ? So, in the case of mains boxes, some of which go to four figures, how the hell can this be justified ? The cost of making them must surely be a small fraction of the selling price. They sell few to the few enthusiasts who are willing and able to be ripped off. It need not be like that. Very few people bother owning specialist hifi. I think we who are into it sometimes forget a basic and simple reason why : rip off prices turn people off, poor and rich alike.

 

Hi,

I can think of two easy solutions. Some people I know use very large Pro Audio Amplifiers (> 500W into 8R and 2 Ohm load stable, bridgable - this gives up to 120V with well over 20A current capicity) and a simple generator as source to produce their regenerated mains for equipment converted to US mains input. This seems to work very well, but you need to house the amps far away as they invariably use very noisy cooling arrangements.

I personally would probably choose instead a "fill in" solution. This becomes complex to design, but requires fairly extensive electronic design.

You need a PLL which locks onto the mains frequency and produces a low distortion sinewave from that, in fact, it would produce what the mains should look like, constant voltage, low distortion.

This clean signal can then be compared to the actual mains and the difference derived. We then connect a transformer in series with the mains and drive it from an amplifier which amplifies the previously derived error voltage and thus "fills in" reduced voltage, bucks out excessive voltage and corrects for flattopping (high distortion).

The advantage is that you only need an amplifier powerfull enough to supply the difference between what the mains should be like and what it is, making the whole thing feasible for passive (quiet as no fans) cooling and fairly affordable.

Meanwhile I am working with a startup company on designing some high end audio gear which has the ability build in to work within tolerance and optimally from 205V - 256V mains voltage (and 96V - 135V) without using switched mode supplies and even without internal regulators for most of the audio circuitry, with DC filters.

Plus, we specified transformers which have electrostatic screens (and use some other tricks I am not inclined to divulge) . This makes the sensitivity of the gear to mains quality drasticallly less, at a notional increase in cost.

I suspect we could repackage the technology together with a "balanced power" insulation transformer build like our own mains transformer easily as a power conditioner, but our own gear does not need it and why should we entertain the competitions poor designs?

Ciao T