The home stretch

In yesterday's post, we learned that our homes present an impedance to our equipment of about 1Ω. This matters, as you can imagine, because when we try and drive a 4Ω speaker with a power source with that high of an impedance we get power line modulation. Put another way, we make things worse for any equipment plugged into our power lines. Adding an active power amplifier like that found in a Power Plant will improve that situation by an easy factor of 100. And, 100 times better performance is a welcome thing to most of us. But now we have an opportunity to make things even better. If we only use the impedance lowering amplifier for that single purpose we lose the opportunity for a couple of major improvements: voltage regulation and waveform correction. Our incoming powerlines suffer from all sorts of maladies including fluctuating voltage, waveform distortion (called flat topping), and powerline modulation from equipment in our own home. Simply lowering the impedance in the line doesn't solve any of these problems. That's where we take the next step in the magic of a Power Plant, we feed the input of our impedance lowering amplifier with a perfect sine wave (instead of the raw incoming power). Now, we have lowered impedance by a factor of 100 and fixed the waveform and restored the missing energy from a flat-topped sine wave. Life is good, but we still haven't tackled the last wish on our list, increasing the size of the power supply capacitors inside our equipment. How to make the caps in your equipment's power supply bigger is tomorrow.