The electricity feeding your audio system matters every bit as much as the components themselves. I know you're probably getting tired of this old broken record speech, but I can't help it being true.
I get asked about solar power more often than you might expect. With so many of us going green these days, the question keeps surfacing: does a photovoltaic system help or hurt your sound? The answer, like most things worth knowing in audio, is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. It depends entirely on what sits between those panels on your roof and the AC outlets feeding your gear.
Here is the thing about solar panels. During the day, your PV inverter is converting DC from the panels into AC for your home. That conversion process introduces high-frequency switching noise directly onto your AC line. Inverters operate at switching frequencies that dump hash into the power feeding your amplifiers and DACs, and it shows up as a gritty, grainy texture in the upper registers. It is not subtle once you know what to listen for. I have measured it on a scope and the results are not pretty.
What I have found in our own testing at PS Audio is that regenerated power solves the solar problem entirely. A Power Plant regenerator takes whatever garbage is on your AC line, tears it down completely, and rebuilds a perfect low-impedance sine wave from scratch. It does not care whether the noise originates from a solar inverter, a refrigerator compressor, or your neighbor's dimmer switches. The regenerator simply creates brand new AC power.
There is a nice irony worth noting. Some of the worst power I have ever measured came from a friend's off-grid solar homestead in the Colorado mountains. He plugged in a regenerator and the improvement was immediate and dramatic. The grain vanished, the soundstage opened up, and he finally heard what his system was capable of delivering.
If you are running solar and care about your sound, recognize that the AC coming out of any inverter needs serious help before it reaches sensitive audio circuits.
Clean power is the foundation everything else sits on, whether that power began its journey as sunlight or coal smoke.
Go green and listen clean.
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