Upgrade the PSU or the Regs?

[Fred]

Apologies if this topic has been covered elsewhere. I was considering the value of upgrading the 15v PSU purchased with my Caiman. I compared Stan's PSU with a SM and a linear PSU, both 15v, without noticing any audible difference. All were of similar price bracket so perhaps I should not have been surprised. I suspect the additional filtering within the Caiman may have made a contribution ironing out nasties. As much as I hate to admit it, big improvements usually cost big bucks. Whilst looking around the forum for inspiration I noticed some members have upgraded the regulators and I wonder if this might be more cost effective than spending a hundred pounds or more on a new PSU. I have these in mind: http://www.hificollective.co.uk/components/nclassd_reg.html Has anyone used these regs or recommend alternatives?

[Canetoad]

I have those regulators in my Caiman and they work very well. There should be a thread somewhere on here with Caiman mods if you are serious about modifying yours. :)

[sq225917]

The Dexa regs are about average as regulators go, not up there with a decent shunt reg, WJ Superreg, Superteddyreg or any of the other well known pre built devices., they don't have a great rep for reliability however as seen by comments on diyaudio.com. I've had two fail out of 6 I purchased.

It's never one size fits all with regs you need to decide what is more important, bandwidth, absolute noise floor, Z out....

[chrism]

I built two linear regulated supplies in one box using Avondale TPR2 regulators and actually removed the internal regulation inside the Caiman. This gave a much more noticeable result than using the Murata superregs with an external linear supply.

I posted what I did somewhere and will try to find a link.

Regards

Chris

[Yomanze]

I built two linear regulated supplies in one box using Avondale TPR2 regulators and actually removed the internal regulation inside the Caiman. This gave a much more noticeable result than using the Murata superregs with an external linear supply.

I posted what I did somewhere and will try to find a link.

Regards

Chris

Yes this would be the best way to go. The internal regs will always introduce a bottleneck.

[MartinT]

Adrian, I used Dexa regs in the Caiman and they made a big improvement over the standard 7812/7805 ones. Now I have Paul Hynes modules in it and they are better still, but not as big a difference as going to the Dexas in the first place. I would rate the latter as good value for money.

Don't discount a better linear external PSU at some later stage, the internal regs work best when feeding off low noise DC.

[Yomanze]

Adrian, I used Dexa regs in the Caiman and they made a big improvement over the standard 7812/7805 ones. Now I have Paul Hynes modules in it and they are better still, but not as big a difference as going to the Dexas in the first place. I would rate the latter as good value for money.

Don't discount a better linear external PSU at some later stage, the internal regs work best when feeding off low noise DC.

I would think that feeding the 2x regs with their own supplies and transformer windings would be a much bigger improvement than plugging in a shared power supply, but yeah I did notice a nice big difference when I swapped out my TC-7510 switching external PSU for a decent linear one.