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The Power Supply


bobfa

Powering electronic equipment is an area of great research in virtually all electronic systems.  Designs that waste less power, run cooler and manage fluctuations of voltage and current to provide “clean” power to our devices are very important.

 

We hear a lot about the LPS (Linear Power Supply) and the SMPS (Switch Mode Power Supply).  In GENERAL it has been shown that high quality Linear Power Supplies improve the performance of audio equipment.  An LPS design can be rather simple.  Improving the quality of the DC power to our devices can get expensive.

 

The SMPS has gotten a bad “rap” in the industry and is shunned do to issues around leakage and RF noise.  In many applications the SMPS is the only way we can supply power to our devices efficiently. Small SMPS power supplies give us the portability we need for devices like phones and laptop computers.

 

Here is a little more info from WikiPedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply

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In my experience the bad rap for SMPS is that even though a high-speed SMPS is not digital it will induce a bi-directional digital-like noise.  Bi-directional implies the digital-like hash / noise travels back up the power cable into the outlet and then induce its digital-like noise into other components sharing the same circuit.  Supposedly all digital products induce this bi-directional noise and some say will go all the way back to the service panel and induce its noise across other circuits.

 

This bi-directional noise can easily be minimized or possibly eliminated with the use of a superior passive, dedicated, bi-directional filtering line conditioner.  However, an external bi-directional filtering line conditioner can do nothing to stop the bi-directional noise from being shared between both channels of a Class D stereo amp because the 2 channels' SMPS most always share the same AC inlet in the chassis.  And it's far worse in a Class D integrated amp because the active gainstage much borrow its AC power from one of the 2 channels which are already sharing the bi-directional noise.  Then the noise from both channels is funneled to the active gainstage and then amplified.  This makes for a very unpretty music presentation, especially if the amps are high-powered because the digital-like noise becomes ampified along with the music.

 

For this reason I only use Class D amps in the monoblock configuration so each monoblock can have its own AC inlet and its own dedicated bi-directional filering line condtioner and hence no sharing of the bi-directional digital-like noise.  BTW, superior line conditioners do far more than just filter bi-directional noise.  In fact, only a few of the superior line conditioners I'm aware of offer bi-directional noise filtering and since I actually like the performance of some Class D amps and because I use a digital source, my superior line conditioners (Jena Labs Model TWO's) are even more superior since they are also filtering this bi-directional digital-like noise from inducing their distortive harm into other components.

 

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Forgive me for being stupid, but is there a point to this thread? And please do not think I am disparaging the importance of power supplies.

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