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Thread: PSU Upgrades. Why?

  1. #41
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    Is it not the case that many manufacturers, to be competitive, will use bits in their amps or whatever that will achieve a certain market price point and where the sound will be adequate? And then offer 'upgrades' (e.g. higher quality regulators, smoothing caps etc) to achieve a better sound? Most often these upgrades will, sadly, be proportionally much more expensive.
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  2. #42
    Join Date: Jan 2013

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    Quote Originally Posted by Edwardlon View Post
    Is it not the case that many manufacturers, to be competitive, will use bits in their amps or whatever that will achieve a certain market price point and where the sound will be adequate? And then offer 'upgrades' (e.g. higher quality regulators, smoothing caps etc) to achieve a better sound? Most often these upgrades will, sadly, be proportionally much more expensive.
    It's all down to cost then as I said much earlier on, but I don't think Geoff believes this.
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  3. #43
    Join Date: Mar 2010

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    Quote Originally Posted by walpurgis View Post
    Seems the point is still being missed.

    If something is working properly it needs no upgrade. If an upgrade is required, then surely it wasn't working properly?

    What is the upgrade doing, 'improving' an item that works exactly as it should and needs no improvement? Is the upgrade just a way to sell us something we don't actually need. Or, are components not functioning correctly without 'upgrading' and therefore defective? You can't have it both ways!


    Seems like you're missing the point.

    You can't put £1000 worth of psu into a product that sells for £100. just like you can't put a engine from a £200,000 Ferrari inside a Fiat that sells for £5,000.

    there's nothing broken in a £100 psu, that's just what you get for £100.

    Its just that the £500 is better.

    If you want better performance open your wallet for it.

    The reason psu's are often the apparently cost limited part is that they are easier to substitute within a design. Any tit can plug in a new psu. Designing an amplifier to have a swappable output stage would be an altogether more difficult task and that's why it doesn't happen.


    There nothing wrong with the performance of a cheap psu, it performs as a cheap psu is expected to perform. It's just that more expensive psu's can be better, much better.
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  4. #44
    Join Date: Feb 2013

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    Sure, everything is made to a price, or should I say, a profit. Better components dont always improve something but they often do.
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  5. #45
    Join Date: May 2016

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    Better power supplies are not needed in my opinion, none of us need upgraded power supplies: to me they are a luxury, so perhaps I think of them as desirable rather than necessary.

    I'm not suggesting that every power upgrade is worthwhile, or even works for that matter, or that the benefits justify the cost. It is easy enough to come across add-on power supplies that cost nearly as much as or even more than the component they are designed to improve.

    I'd argue that the originals are not necessarily 'inadequate' so much as 'may be improved upon', and in general I don't think that manufacturers are mistaken to provide an upgrade path for their products. I have the following luxury add-ons, some of which seem worth having, others less so:

    * PSXRs [£450 each] supplying Cyrus amps, and while these power upgrades brought improvements, they did so at a hefty price. For me the benefits didn't justify the outlay. The power upgrades exceed 50% of each main unit's original price. I bought these units early on in my changing over from all in one audio units to hi-fi separates when I was careless of how much I spent. I would be far less likely to buy such items now, or at least I'd take them to on approval. In hindsight buying one secondhand PSXR would have been a much smarter thing to do. A costly lesson for me.

    *A Rega TTP [£125], feeding a Rega RP3/Elys 24 combo [£500] a better cost to benefit ratio than the PSXRs, but still over 20% of the cost of the unit it is intended to enhance. In this case the improvements to the sound and the convenience of being to change speeds without having to take off the platter and adjusting the belt seemed worth it to me.

    * A Caiman Mk II running off a 12v battery [£27] and the gain made there was definitely worth the modest outlay.

  6. #46
    Join Date: Apr 2011

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    Quote Originally Posted by Puffin View Post
    The Teddy Pardo article IMO goes quite a way to explain how better implementation of regulators and their circuits "should" lead to a less noisy supply. Would it cost a manufacturer vastly more to use something like this? I built several of his TeddyRegs and Powerregs some years ago after a group buy of the boards on PFM. I have to say that I did not notice a vast improvement in SQ, but then I probably didn't implement them in the best way. As Jez says "In many cases the external power supply is totally irrelevant. EVERYTHING is down to how the power is dealt with inside the main unit".
    Prior to fitting Teddyregs, My old budget Cambridge Audio 640v2 CD player was a bit thin sounding and a had a kind of closed-In 2d sort of sound. It got good reviews and I know some people thought It sounded just like any other CDP.
    After fitting Teddyregs and a PFM flea, It was much bigger and 3d sounding, with more detail. To me It was a big difference, but I can Imagine some people not hearing much of an Improvement.

  7. #47
    Join Date: Nov 2011

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    Surely if you introduce a ' better' power supply it will only reap benefits with a 'better' mains lead?
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  8. #48
    Join Date: Oct 2012

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    Quote Originally Posted by fatmarley View Post
    Prior to fitting Teddyregs, My old budget Cambridge Audio 640v2 CD player was a bit thin sounding and a had a kind of closed-In 2d sort of sound. It got good reviews and I know some people thought It sounded just like any other CDP.
    After fitting Teddyregs and a PFM flea, It was much bigger and 3d sounding, with more detail. To me It was a big difference, but I can Imagine some people not hearing much of an Improvement.
    Yup. The power at Point Of Load is all that really matters. A good regulator, as close as possible to POL and of vast importance, correct grounding practice, is basically where it's at. Get all this right and whats upstream of it, PSU wise, is largely irrelevant

    Because this (and most of the important stuff in fact) is not something which a layman can just "plug 'n play" it gets ignored by enthusiasts whilst "unplug the old one, plug in the new one and there yer go" foo gets pages of debate I guess on a site for non technical audiophiles that's how it is of course.... And I can't complain 'cos if everyone knew all this stuff and was competent to fit it I'd be out of a job!
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  9. #49
    RothwellAudio Guest

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    Quote Originally Posted by Arkless Electronics View Post
    A good regulator, as close as possible to POL and of vast importance, correct grounding practice, is basically where it's at. Get all this right and whats upstream of it, PSU wise, is largely irrelevant
    I agree entirely. This is a fact often overlooked by audiophiles, or more likely they're completely unaware of the importance of correct grounding. The noise floor in a circuit can be worsened to a surprising degree just by having a wire or PCB track take the wrong path. At one extreme a circuit can barely work at all with a mis-routed track. At the other extreme, getting the details right can be the difference between perfectly OK performance and great performance.
    Doubling the size of the mains transformer is "brute force and ignorance" attempt to get great performance (in my opinion, of course).

  10. #50
    Join Date: Mar 2017

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    Is there a way for us neophytes to test that grounding has been implemented correctly in our systems?

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