As you'll gather quickly enough, I'm a novice, and I would appreciate the guidance of someone experienced in electronic circuit design.
I would like to build a simple Voltage divider circuit. I want to take the single phase 120VAC, 15A, 60Hz out of my wall and step down the voltage/current to around 2 - 4VAC & 1A - 1.4A. My goal is to feed this signal into my audio converters so I can see the constituent harmonic energies and other noise in the mains AC. I would like to read from 1Hz to 20kHz.
I'm guessing the easiest way to do this would be to use a transformer, but as I understand it, transformers don't handle frequencies equally. So I'm thinking a resistor-based circuit might do it. Do they make resistors that could dissipate that much energy safely? (i.e., 1800W less approx. 5.6W). Is it that easy...? (My suspicion is that nothing ever is) I would also like to build in a fuse so that a transient in the mains doesn't blow my converters!!!
There is also the possibility of a zener diode-based circuit, but I'm unsure whether the diode would introduce unwanted changes to the frequency spectrum, as in the case of transformers.
Your help is very much appreciated.