Audiophile buys his own utility transformer for cleaner electricity. Queen never sounded clearer.

82-year-old retired lawyer Takeo Morita buys his own utility pole, with transformer, for cleaner electricity and perfect sound forever.

“Now, it feels like Queen is in this room, just for me,” he says, playing vinyl, a medium that literally decays every play. I wonder what his ears’ 82-year-old frequency-response curve would measure as.

This is actually not a new form of audiophile woo. Apart from other people doing this in Japan (where there’s a magazine, Power Sources & Accessories, devoted to the field), the Hacker News discussion lists other examples, e.g. a separate transformer to feed a system costing four times as much as the Dallas house it lives in. Sounded amazing, but.

Noisy power is a thing in the real world. In the world of proper professional audio, there is a setup where, instead of live and neutral, you have balanced power. “Technical power” is hideously illegal to wire up a house with, but is good for its use cases. There’s detail to think about.

“It’s completely beyond my understanding,” says his wife, Reiko, 57. “But if I take it away from him, he will lose the motivation to live.” This is how my spouse and I deal with each other’s obesssions.