Question on power supplies for music server

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glynnw

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Have been reading with great interest the latest artcle on Computer Audiophile about the latest (Version 3) of his CAPS music server -
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/496-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-c-p-s-v3-carbon/ - and I am really intrigued by the improvements he has found using a Red Wine battery supply.  Also notice on another site that several people are asking Paul Hynes about his designing a custom power supply for the server.  However, the Red Wine unit is $900 and the Paul Hynes design will be abt $1500.  Since the point of building the server is to get a great sound at a low price, spending as much or more for the power supply, which will still not be powerful enough to run any extra spinning hard drives, makes this whole exercise a bit too rich for my blood at the moment.  And apparently standard PC power supplies, while inexpensive, are much too noisy for a quality server.  Any suggestions from anyone about reasonable priced (sub$500) alternatives .  I mean absolutely no disrespect for Mr Hynes or Red Wine - I hope they all prosper.  Units need to output 9V and 12V both, in order to also power the SOtM usb port. Is this something an inexperienced builder could assemble?
 
Thanks, I'll check those out.  I should have been more clear.  By noisy power supply I was referring to electrical noise being sent along the power lines, not physical noise, like a fan makes.  The server designer is pretty honest about not understanding how noise is transmitted electrically through the server, but he says it is noticeably absent when the battery supply is put into place.
 
Sorry - I have to comment on 'half baked' ideas over on Computer Audiophile. It's RIDICULOUS to me to go down the path of building a 'dedicated' PC server. It makes no sense. Us the PC as the transport. Get the bits off the thing the best you can and go from there. IMHO network protocol is still king. USB is gaining traction. A laptop can and should be able to a HELL of alot more than just feed the bits to a DAC. And it should, and can, do it BIT PERFECT. Jacking off over what kind of ram you have, and SSD drives etc. is just fucking ridiculous. Sorry, I feel better now.
 
Darn - I had a long response typed out and did something wrong and lost it and am too lazy to try to do it over.  I am going to keep an open mind about all of this.  I have heard differences in computer parts just as I have heard differences in capacitors, tubes, interconnects, etc.  Go to Computer Audiophile and read this guys notes on designing it and you'll see he is a serious audiophile and pretty open minded.  Some of his discoveries have surprised him.  I just bought an expensive USB cable, mostly to prove to myself that Absolute Sound was wrong and it couldn't really make a difference.  I was wrong - it sounds better. If bits is just bits, then wire is just wire and, as Julian Hirsch pointed out years ago, all amps sound the same. And if I build this and it sounds no better than my current server, so what?  I'll learn something and have fun doing it and that is the point. And if it sounds better, then it's a double win.  For your entertainmant, attached is a picture of my current music server.
 

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You go Glynn! As a friend of mine (who was quite heavily involved in many of the comparisons made of various music server configurations a few years ago) says - "I used to think I had it all figured out, until I figured out that I didn't".
 
I certainly was skeptical about computer hardware for a music server, but there are differences, whether you want to hear them or not.

Chris at Computer Audiophile is a fantastic resource!
 
IMO, the bottom line is, the bits are going to be exchanged in increasingly more efficient and sonically desirable ways as time goes on. How that sifts out is anyone's guess. Much debate will be had on all sides until the end of time. What is the magical way to go? That will become more clear. Will USB rule? Hard to know. My money says it probably will. What I can say, is that, when the winner is chosen, there will be very few variables left to consider (cables, etc.). Plug and play will always win. Even for audiophiles.
 
ramicio said:
... As long as there is not enough jitter to totally miss the data, there will be no affect on the data. ...
Click to expand...
This is true in the digital domain. However, in the conversion from analog to digital and from digital to analog, jitter in the sample update time manifests as phase noise, which is both measurable and audible. Since the effect is proportional to the signal slew rate, the audibility undoubtedly depends on the particular musical sample being listened to. Psychoacoustics is still a science, albeit a much less precise one than communications theory.
 
Caucasian Blackplate said:
earwaxxer said:
Plug and play will always win. Even for audiophiles.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I am waiting in the wings for something along these lines that lets you add your own storage.
Click to expand...

There are some dacs that let you plug in a usb drive or SD card and can read files directly off them.
 
"Some of his discoveries have surprised him'".......  I think we ALL have been there a time or two (or more) in our audio lives... The surprises from our experiments (both professional and amateur, knowledgeable or appallingly banal) can yield some of the most fun we can have in our hobby...  Holy cow, have you guys ever visited Peter and May Belt's website??? (you are in for an entertaining treat).... We understand what you are saying Ramicio, and you are correct in the things you say, I feel anyway, however, I think Paul explains it perfectly as to the audible variables that (at least most people) can audibly detect, experiment with and thus be, at times, surprised by...... thats the fun of the hobby..... We also get the fact that you wont ever take us seriously and thats cool... Audio hobby as in Life is all about balance, and it is cool to have you as our 1s is 1s, bits are bits dude..... But as Paul points out, it is also well known that a hell of lot of other things happen along the way in the transactional process of converting your 1s is 1s and bits is bits ultimately to a form of vibrational energy that our organic ears will accept..... The 1s, 0s, and bits are just a part of the team.....
 
glynnw said:
Have been reading with great interest the latest artcle on Computer Audiophile about the latest (Version 3) of his CAPS music server -
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/496-computer-audiophile-pocket-server-c-p-s-v3-carbon/ - and I am really intrigued by the improvements he has found using a Red Wine battery supply.  Also notice on another site that several people are asking Paul Hynes about his designing a custom power supply for the server.  However, the Red Wine unit is $900 and the Paul Hynes design will be abt $1500.  Since the point of building the server is to get a great sound at a low price, spending as much or more for the power supply, which will still not be powerful enough to run any extra spinning hard drives, makes this whole exercise a bit too rich for my blood at the moment.  And apparently standard PC power supplies, while inexpensive, are much too noisy for a quality server.  Any suggestions from anyone about reasonable priced (sub$500) alternatives .  I mean absolutely no disrespect for Mr Hynes or Red Wine - I hope they all prosper.  Units need to output 9V and 12V both, in order to also power the SOtM usb port. Is this something an inexperienced builder could assemble?
Click to expand...


Back on topic and answering your question, if you are able and willing to DIY, you can do a linear or pseudo-linear supply for a lot less than the ones you referenced. Of course, in my experience, while it doesn't take much design, implementation, and expense to make a supply that will out-perform any computer-SMPS, it does take something most of us mere mortals don't have to make a top-notch supply and I think you'll find that the RW and PH supplies will out-perform most of our puny DIY efforts. Still, my experience is that you can still make significant improvements with DIY supplies.

Note that most SMPS's, especially computer SMPS's, have been designed with no consideration for producing good clean audio. While it is possible to do so, again, it takes a significant effort. While you do see SMPS-powered higher-end amps (and really have for a long time... see David Berning), you see very few high-end-ish source components with SMPS's and those tend to be by the specialists like Linn who have the experience and wherewithal to make them work well.

As the Mobo recommended for the CAPS V3 just needs roughly 12v & the SOtM needs 6.5v-9v, you need at least two output voltages. Cheapest is to make a supply that provides a regulated 12v output and regulate that down to 9v. Better is to have two separate supplies. Search on the Audio Asylum for the very fine choke-filtered supplies designed by John Swenson who has also done the digital design of the up-coming BH DAC. I did that and quickly located 6v & 9v versions... I vaguely remember that he also published a 12v version, but you may have to hunt a bit for it. Doing one of each of those is a quick way to improve your CAPS V3 for less $.

Another useful concept, that I initially saw in cics's cMP/cPlay setup info (cicsMemoryPlayer.com), is to power the noisy bits separate from the more critical ones. He used commercially-available SMPS's... I found improvements going with fairly inexpensive linear supplies here too. So supplying your HDD/SSD and other noisy consumers of power from additional separate supply(s) can also provide benefits. But even here, don't cheapen up and go with SMPS wall-warts... instead at least make an additional linear supply.

My 2 cents.

Greg in Mississippi
 
gstew said:
. Of course, in my experience, while it doesn't take much design, implementation, and expense to make a supply that will out-perform any computer-SMPS, it does take something most of us mere mortals don't have to make a top-notch supply
Click to expand...

It also takes quite a bit of space! 

If one needed a +12V, +5V, and +3.3V linear supply, I'd suggest at least two separate rails (5V and 3.3V aren't so far apart that they would have to be separate).  Choke filtering and shottky diodes are indeed a nice idea.
 
ramicio said:
It's a pointless idea.
Click to expand...

Tim, that is not my experience... and I know others who would also disagree with you.

One difference on my setup from a 'server'... my DAC is inside the computer, mounted on the digital portion of an ESI Juli@ sound card. Both the soundcard and the DAC have their own power supplies and are not powered from the motherboard power, so they share grounds, but no power with the computer.

I originally used a supply with two 12v linear sections, one directly feeding the processor P4 plug, the other a PicoPSU for the 20-24 pin main ATX power connection. Now I have a fully linear supply, 2 12v rails, 2 5v rails, and 3.3v. Yup, as Paul says, it takes up a lot of space... about 4-6x that of the original computer SMPS. And it is much more inefficient and produces a good bit of heat (like these are serious problems for us who like tubes!). And I agree with Paul that choke-filtering is the way to go... planned for my next iteration, but it gets a lot bigger then and I have to replan my music player's packaging. It does have soft-recovery diodes... lots of them! These are key to the sonics, as are good regulators. And also, I did have to deal with computer turn-on sequencing and signaling, although that turned out to have some simple solutions.

I do know others who have done either hybrid linear-PicoPSU or fully linear supplies with SPDIF or USB-connected DACs and also found it worthwhile sonically. I've even know of battery-powered setups, but that's even beyond where I'll go... at least for now.

Having done this, I can say without any question that it is worthwhile if you want the best sound from a computer music setup, whether using the output from a DAC inside of the PC or an SPDIF or USB-connected one (whether it is powered by the USB buss or separately powered). The only setup I might expect it not to matter is when one has an ethernet-connected server to a player like a Squeezebox.

And to do a supply with a single 12v rail for the motherboard recommended for the CAPS V3, it would be a snap!

My suggestion... try it before you say it doesn't make a difference!

Greg in Mississippi

P.S. The attached picture is of my music server's linear supply during development. It got a bit more complex (and uglier!) as it got to its current, fully-operational state. It has been running mostly 24-7 for the last two years, so reliability is not an issue.
 

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ramicio said:
Back up these claims with documented blind tests.  I've already said that the analog section should have a good power supply (and I still believe that it doesn't really matter), but to think the digital side powered by a switched mode power supply is going to taint the sound, that's just asinine.
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Let it go ramico.
 
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