Suggestions for cable for dedicated AC line? Audiophile breaker?

Does anyone have suggestions for high quality in wall AC wire for dedicated 20 amp lines? I actually saw one described by Core audio for $22,000 for 50 feet. (my run is about 35 feet but not looking to spend rediculous dollars)

Anyone heard Jps labs?

Also has anyone tried or know of a USA comptible audiophile grade breaker to insert into an existing panel.

Also any thoughts about running 220v for the BHK monoblocks?

There’s little advantage to running BHKs in 220 volt mode that I am aware of. I assume the plan would be to get balanced power and the benefits of it, but in my experience that does not seem to matter. Balanced power helps with cables and some noise issues, but rarely the sound itself.

Certainly one can do it, but it’s a lot of trouble for little potential gain.

Hey Email -

IMHO, super-duper expensive wire and circuit breakers aren’t going to help you much in the power realm. But there are things that will. It’s all about lowering the noise and resistance.

Here are some things that have worked for me - in no particular order. I can not say if any of these are NEC (National Electric Code) or meet your local code - so have your local electrician sus that out. In fact, I had trouble getting an electrician to follow my suggestions - I got lots of eye rolls and “we’ll get back to you” when I was looking for assistance with these projects. I wound up doing much of it myself.

My Suggestions -

Conduit home run to your outlet. The conduit acts and shielding for your power lines.

I use 10AWG silverplated Milspec, teflon jacketed wire. Easily found on eBay and less than $2 a foot for my 40’ run.

Use said wire for home run from your panel to the outlet - including a dedicated ground. Even though you have conduit as ground, use dedicated ground wire, also home run to the panel. We want as low of resistance to ground as possible.

If you can, no other power lines run through this conduit. K.I.S.S. We don’t want any noise from other circuits getting in there. (this one I had to break as I needed two 20 amp circuits in the same area and had no room for a second run of conduit)

Quality outlet and/or filtered outlet. I manged to track down one of the old PS Audio Solo outlets. It helped a little.

Have more ground rods added to your panel to again lower the resistance to ground. This is where an electrician helps. It’s easy to add more ground rods to your ground, but a good electrician should have a special meter that can measure your current ground impedance (in ohms), and prove to you that adding more ground rods has lowered your resistance to ground. We want to give the noise an easy path to ground and away from our system.

I did all of this for less than $600 and the drop in noise floor was impressive.

Again, all we’ve done is lowered resistance, and improved the shielding/filtering of our power. That’s all your power system really needs. You might be able to push this further with audiophile grade isolation transformers or filters at the panel, but for what I paid I’m pretty sure I’m at the point of diminishing returns for very little money.

Then of course, a nice P5 or P10 and a DirectStream with the latest OS to bring it all together. :)

LR’s advice sounds sensible. The only modification that I would suggest is that you need one really good grounding rod with a good connection on top (heat fused if you can get it). Multiple rods just set up multiple potentials and the current will flow to the lowest one anyway. The ground rod needs to be in contact with the ground water so sometimes locating it beyond the drip line of your house is a good idea in drier climates.

To clarify my point above - I meant adding grounding rod to your existing grounding rod. Each one you add (especially as you mentioned in moist earth) will lower the resistance to ground. I wouldn’t have different grounding rods on different ends of the house as that could introduce a ground loop - I’m talking about daisy chaining them together.

http://www.lightningprotection.com/pdfs/resources/knowledge-transfer/technical-papers/principles-of-grounding-design.pdf