I am trying to get some brightness out of the EL wire, and 140VPP is not sufficient. Tonight, I hooked a step up transformer up to the output of my old HP sine wave generator (200CD) and was curious what voltage I could get out of the transformer and how frequency dependent it was. The transformer is a mains power transformer (with the generator hooked up to the low voltage side), so it is happiest around 50 - 150Hz.

Watching the brightness of the EL wire, it appears to be mostly voltage dependent and not as much frequency dependent. With the output voltage around 400 to 450VPP and the frequency around 140 to 150Hz, the blue EL wire was visible in a brightly lit room. In a dim room, it looked great. Tomorrow, I will go see if I can find an audio transformer that will deal with higher frequencies better, so that I can try raising the frequency above 180Hz.

The photo-triacs that I am using for driving the wires will handle up to 600VPP, so 400 to 450VPP is not totally crazy.

It looks like this project is going to need a completely different high voltage supply bubble gummed in to work at all.