Clean power for your.... SSD/HDD...?

So I've been seeing a lot of this lately that providing clean power clean power to the drive housing your music via LPS or something of the like can apparently improve SQ, anyone experimented with this? seems fishy to me.

 

For crying out loud.

Does it make a night-day difference even if playing the file from memory? Even a RAM disk?

 

The Midas touch turned everything to gold; the audiophool touch turns everything into the brown stuff that steams out of the backside of cows.

It goes beyond snake oil. A growing segment of the crowd that used to be proud of the word audiophile, the 'phools, are discarding real technology and creating a kind of mythology. And, having resisted it for so long, they have welcomed the computer, about which some of them (including more than a few who do actually know their way around an analogue circuit) know nothing into their tinkering arms.



And... Assuming correctly-functioning hardware (of the ordinary kind), I'd bet that none of those 'phools could blind-test music played from RAM from music played from the optical CD drive.

 

This is magic rock level bullshit. What's the amount of voltage fluctuation on the LPS's, my PSU has a worst-case actually measurement by an independent reviewer of 0.3%. Honestly, using something else to power disk drives is probably liable to fry them, there's a lot of protection circuitry built into PSUs that's probably not present in these audiophool products.

I don't know why this offends me more than magical resonating bowls, quantum optimisers, and directional cables, but it does. I wanna find one of these, and send it to JonnyGuru to test in his PSU rig to compare against my AX1500i. I bet my PSU wins.

 

These silly claims are coming from Computer Audiophile and/or Audio Asylum. Got a whole following there that thinks that making CD rips with a linear powered CD drive would "sound better". Yes, two rips with the same EAC checksum sounds different. These folks seem to take the idea that all bits are not the same to the extreme, even before any audio clock/playback gets involved with those bits.

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f...ash-drives-sound-better-alex-was-right-22116/

 

Well, shit.

Egad...

 

Ahemm, reminds me someone, but can't quite put my finger on it ...

 

I don't understand why and how some people get offended and/or angry about such things.

Personally (and also because i am a diyer) i am always pro linear power supplies.

They surely have less noise, and stable output, on the one hand.

On the other hand electronic equipment produce emi/rfi as they work.

I am not going to claim audible differences, but surely if electronic equipment work with less emi/rfi and dead stable voltages, they work better full stop, even if this "better" function is inaudible.

There are many factors as to why electronic products are not accompanied with good linear supplies and one major one is the cost.

On the other hand it is common for snakeoil companies (not only them but even established companies) to produce accessories that do or don't really work... it is a part of the industry and we know this.

I keep an open mind to all these things and anyone seeking improvements (even minor ones) in their music reproduction system should bear in mind the pros and cons of these "improvements" also versus cost.

For me to build a lps is quite a simple procedure and certainly i wouldnt go and lash out big amounts on ready made ones claiming that they vastly improve anything you hook them up on.

A friend has lps everywhere (adsl router, Ethernet switch, nas, rpi2 server, win pc, ssd hd's) in his system and i must say since he did so the system does sound better (or different and i prefer it so).

Just my thoughts, please don't attack me

 

Once it has been concluded that the sound is different with an AC fuse placed one way vs. another, then everything becomes possible. I would bet they could conclude that power produced by nuclear plants is grainy and that coal fired plants produce a softer "tube-like" character. Once they start trotting out the same tired list of superlatives to describe the "improvement" in SQ you know the phools are at it.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

 

Take a look at jonnyguru.com and read a few PSU reviews over there. The Corsair AX1500i is particularly good. Modern powersupplies are damn good, with tolerances better than most people realize. Like I said earlier, +- 0.3% is amazing by any standard. Next all current HDDs and SSDs use the serial ATA (SATA) protocol, which has two parallel channels (in and out) that operate on a balanced fully differential principle. This provides a lot of noise reduction on the signal lines. Besides, PSU noise is the least of our worries in terms of noise inside a computer. My GTx 780 is by far the most electrically noisy component inside that case, but that is operating in the MHz range. I don't have a backplate, so that whole side just radiates noise. And finally, your music has to pass through the CPU, which is doing crazy GHZ stuff and dealing with all kinds of noise. Any analog noise reduction techniques performed on a digital signal before this point are wasted. Using opto-isolation and a LPS to run a USB card makes sense, but hard drives are at a point in the chain where things don't matter yet.

Next, let's consider disk reading and writing. SSDs are simple, it basically just does lookups whenever a read comes in. HDDs need to physically move parts, though random access reads are still well above the throughput of high resolution audio. Also consider that HDDs have a lot of momentum, and thus spin down pretty slowly, so minor voltage fluctuations should not affect their read speed. To affect the read speed of an SSD, you can drop voltagae low enough it shuts off, or you can fry it. Anyway, let's assume that we can throttle disk reading and not smoke disks. Let's assume you're listening to flac, because nobody deals with uncompressed WAV files. Flac bitrate is in the Mbps range, and always less than 10 as far as anyone seems to know. SATA has a max bandwidth of 6Gbps. You'd have to throttle IO by three orders of magnitude to affect playback. In practice the only time I have issues with audio playback is when I've got a stream on, I'm listening to music, I'm in a graphic intensive game, and I left my chess kibitzer running at full throttle in the background using 12 threads. If even one thread is free of the kibitzer thrashing the cache, I'm good.

TL;DR - an LPS with your HDDs and SSDs is pointless because of what's downstream in the digital chain, and becuase its not going to affect audio playback due to the bandwidth available.

 

I think that was the site where I found that I had, unknowingly, bought a switching power supply that was well engineered, measured extremely well, and also did well in the physical-silence stakes. Hey, I bought one that went with the case, the rest was luck! Sadly, though, it died, and when you need your PC up and running that day, rather than being an idea that was forming up on a buying list, the choices may not be there. So what's the big difference with the new unit? I can physically hear it more often. Apart from actually sounding different, does it sound different? Of course not.

(Whenever I write stuff like that, I find myself arguing with myself! It is possible for power supplies to be really bad. It is possible for power supplies to inject noise. Apparently it is especially possible with bad laptop power supplies. This is back in the realms of working or not, as in, hey, it makes a buzzing noise and not 'phool night and day differences)

There are many aspects to pride of ownership. Taking some pleasure in knowing that something looks, feels and hopefully is, well-made and well-engineered, even if it is hidden away inside a case, is something that probably counts for something for a lot of us here. i don't have a problem with that at all: it is a very different thing to rewriting electrical and computer science.

 

And this is why I don't identify as an 'audiophile'.

 

Pretty much. Due to my experience, not my thinking, I am firmly in the everything matters and JLTI camp, just take measurements so we have some idea of what might be going on. Before I had experience and got my feet wet I was a hardline skeptic.

Computers do a lot of useful things like let you control a vast library of music from a mobile device app. upsample on the fly, play high resolution files, apply DRC, and many other things. They are also inherently flexible as opposed to the appliance style devices. They do produce a lot of noise, but this IMO is not an excuse to just give up and say oh well nothing can be done. Graphics cards produce a lot of noise, so I don't use one on my music server. CPU's produce a lot of noise so I keep the power state constant and use a board with a very good power supply for CPU and RAM. I also disable whichever components I'm not using eg unused USB controllers, motherboard features etc.

I have both an AX1200i, the best switching mainstream PSU I could find, as well as a linear PSU. They don't sound the same. The PC works very well with the Corsair and there are no dropouts etc. but the sound has certain characteristics. The PC also works fine with the full linear ATX PSU - well it has crashed once in a few months being on 24/7 and probably doesn't regulate voltage as well as the Corsair nor does it have the same PSU reservoir capacitance, and runs very hot, so thermal shutdown of the PSU is a possibility. The linear ATX PSU I am using, however, does (according to testing by others) have lower noise, even under real world load testing.

Why use it? Put simply the sound with the linear PSU is better to my ears, less forward, noisy, hashy, better image stability, more nuance level details come out of the recordings. Some might prefer the noisy forward sound of the Corsair as well as it's reliability and not heating the whole room and using all the electricity but I care more about how my system sounds.

As for HDD/SSD powering, I have not bothered to do this personally - it's too much of a hassle and too much to go wrong. I have experimented listening to different storage devices, ram drives, HDD, SSD. I believe I heard differences between them, but the differences are beyond subtle. Some people can be bothered to go after more than subtle stuff. For some people that is all they seem to think about. These days I care more about doing work at system setup and then having a system that is easy to use and administrate after that. If it is reasonably easy and inexpensive to change stuff that makes the beyond small changes I'll do it. If it's going to cost hundreds of dollars to marginally change the performance of a just a HDD/SSD to me that isn't worth the expense or effort. For some people it is something they want to pursue and that's valid enough for them to chose how they spend their time and money.

There is also the other possibility, sometimes audiophile stuff sounds different because its worse. I see this with USB cables, and it's more than possible that some of the computer tweaks are actually making performance worse but that people prefer the sound of the worse performance. It's perfectly possible that all these linear power supplies are actually making things worse. That's not what me ears and own experience tell me so far... But I will not exclude the possibility that at some future date I will completely change my mind, or my setup will change etc.

Generally I also live and let live. I share my experience and let others take it or leave it. Could be that their critical listening skills or system are in a different place to where I am at. I don't take any of this personally - it's just a hobby it's not like my career is hinging on being the expert of everything in HiFi. I would also rather change my mind and be right than be consistent. There is a lot of stuff I used to do with my system, (Windows Server OS, USB/SPDIF converter etc.) and at various stages these things sounded better. Now as I change other things in my system, or develop as a listener, I am finding that those things make my system worse.

 

You obviously have little understanding how computers work. There is no way, no way at all the storage devices impact your listening experience. Why not just admit the obvious, that you have bias and want to hear a difference where none can possibly exist.

Please explain to us all how a storage device can effect playback quality. Please, I beg you, enlighten us.

 

I can't explain how computer work, but I can hear the difference between a song stored in external HDD (connected by USB) and a song inside internal SSD. The internal SSD one sound better, less strain, imaging and staging more defined, and more body on its mids.

But I never compared different type of HDD, memory etc. I'm quite content with what I have. Like drez said, it's only a hobby (to be enjoyed). Not worth to be OCD about this

 

Head-Fi has been invading SBAF quite a bit lately.