posted 10-17-2004 10:33 PM                    

quote: Steve Guttag

---

Whom ever told you that just because you have balanced inputs negates the need for a proper shield doesn't have a clue as to what they are talking about. What you just gave was very bad advice/information.

---

AH, but then you must not have any broadcast experience A true balanced input will cancel any signal present on both wires, both wires being hot in a balanced system. Example, 30 years ago high quality audio was fed over "unshielded" pairs of telephone wires over "miles" from a radio station studio to a transmitter site. These lines had to met the spec of 50HZ to 15,000HZ with noise 55db down from 0db.
The solution is in fact temporary but yet, not an unsound (no pun intended) solution.

posted 10-19-2004 03:32 AM                    

quote: Gord Mcleod

---

Also it not only make unstable but in some case dangerous situations athat also may contravene other laws

---

And here's proof he should have really been a trial attorney instead of a poet...... .

Mark

posted 10-20-2004 11:10 AM                       

quote:

---

The modern thyristor (Triac or SCR) dimmer has one fairly severe drawback in its performance in that it dims by switching on the current to the load part-way through each mains cycle. Cutting the leading smooth-part off a mains cycle produces a current with a very rapid turn-on time which generates both mains distortions and EMI. Chokes are included in dimmers to slow down the rapid switch-on (rise time) of the chopped current. The longer the rise time the less EMI and mains distortion produced.

Turn on of the triac in the middle of the phase causes fast voltage and current changes. A typical thyristor/triac starts to fully conduct at around 1 microsecond time after triggering, so the current change is very fast if it not limited in any way. Those fast voltage and current changes cause high frequency interference going to mains wiring unless there are suitable radio frequency interference (RFI) filter built into the circuit. The corners in the waveform effectively consist of 50/60Hz plus varying amounts of other frequencies that are multiples of 50/60Hz. In some cases the interference goes up to 1..10Mhz frequencies and even higher. The wiring in your house acts as an antenna and essentially broadcasts it into the air. Cheap bad quality light dimmers don't have adequate filtering and they cause easily lots of radio interference.

Dimmer circuits typically use coils that limit limit the rate of rise of current to that value which would result in acceptable EMI. Typical filtering in light dimmers causes the current rise time (current rises from 10% to 90%) to be in range of 30..50 microseconds. This gives acceptable results in typical dimmer applications in home (typically this limitation is made using 40..100 uH coil).

If the dimmers are used in places where dimmer is a serious problem for sensitive sound equipments (theatres, TV-studios, rock concerts etc.) a slower current rise time would be preferred. Typically the current rise time in light dimmer packs made for stage applications have a current rise speed of around 100..350 microseconds. If noise is a big problem (TV studios etc.), even slower current rise times are sometimes asked. Those current rise times up to 1 millisecond can be achieved with special dimmers or suitable extra coil fitted in series with the dimmer.

The coil itself does not typically solve the whole problem because of the self-capacitance of the inductor: they typically resonate below 200 kHz and look like capacitors to disturbances above the resonance frequency. That's why there must be also capacitors to suppress the interference at higher frequencies.

If your dimmer circuit cause interference, you can try to filter out the interference by adding a small capacitor (typically 22nF to 47 nF) in parallel with the dimmer circuit as near as possible to the electronics inside the circuit as possible. Keep in mind to use a capacitor which is rated for this kind of applications (use capacitors marked with X). Keep in mind that the filter capacitor and it's wiring make a resonance circuit with certain resonance frequency (typically around 3.6 MHz with 0.1 uF capacitor). The capacitor does not work well as filter with the frequencies higher than the resonance frequency of the circuit.

---