Uptone Audio Regen

[westy]

Can anyone confirm that the Regen power supply (dc plug) has the negative on the outside, and positive in the inside?

[Jiffi32]

Can anyone confirm that the Regen power supply (dc plug) has the negative on the outside, and positive in the inside?

 

Yes it does!

[westy]

Thank you!

[Jiffi32]

eBay power supply to the Amber, just adjusted to 9v (from 7.5) this morning.

 

would be interested to hear you're thoughts on going from 7.5 to 9v, haven't tried it on mine yet

[jtwrace]

I run my REGEN at 12Vdc from my JS-2.

[Angular Mo]

I received my new Regen today, woohoo! (order #1580)

 

Next is to decide on an affordable power supply unit.

 

I recall having bookmarked this from earlier in this thread;

 

TeraDak U9VA Linear Low noise Power Supply

 

But, IIRC, there was another one ~USD 175 that people said was obviously way much better.

 

The TeddyPardos are too expensive for my purposes.

 

Any suggestions?

[Pascal64]

Read post #2123

[YashN]

I've recently upgraded the clock of my Regen Amber:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]19781[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]19782[/ATTACH]

 

So I would just like to encourage the diyers around here to take this step. It's more than worthy the efford and extra costs and it literally takes the Regen into extremes.

 

All the best, Henning

 

Henning, I think this earned you the title of Regen Degen (in the positive sense)

[JohnSwenson]

A bird told me that with the green REGEN plugged into the amber REGEN beating can occur leading to unstable sound quality and dropouts. I have observed similiar of this behavior and found myself intuitively powering the amber down and back up to remedy this behavior. At first I thought it was my Vega DACs hi-speed (exact) mode setting, but now I am not so sure. Curiously this seems is more noticeable on Redbook playback.

 

For now, I am using the amber only to see if this behavior stops.

 

Has anyone else with two REGENS noticed the same? Maybe with two REGENS the clocks need to be synced?

 

Could you please go into a lot more detail about what you are hearing that you are attributing to "beating"? Yes the clocks are separate and close, but that is the normal mode of operation for USB. ALL USB systems work that way. Every USB device has a local clock in its receiver that will be slightly off from the clock in the transmitter, they are designed to work that way. So when you plug your DAC into a computer without a REGEN you have exactly the same issue, the clock in the DAC will be slightly off from the clock in the computer. One or two REGENs in the path does not change the behavior, each entity in the path will have its own clock which will have a SLIGHTLY different frequency than what is up/down stream, that is the way the system is designed to work.

 

What you are hearing is most likely caused by something else.

 

John S.

[zilch0md]

I've found that Ferrite can cause high frequency roll off..

 

Oh, thanks Erik!

[Jud]

would be interested to hear you're thoughts on going from 7.5 to 9v, haven't tried it on mine yet

 

Music is just sounding awesome through the system. My wife hates jazz; The Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers came on and I could tell she was impressed and actually enjoying it. I said "Sounds like they're right here in the room," and she agreed.

 

I haven't bothered to concentrate on any comparisons, though. I'd encourage you to try it out for yourself - simple enough to adjust it back if 7.5 sounds better to you.

[sig8]

Received my Regen last Monday, connected it to the system with a Paul Hynes SR3 turned down to 7.5v. Noise level increased compared to what it was before Regen. I thought let it burn for few days. Nothing changed until today while the system was running 24 hours, so I wanted to see what was going on, and connected an Anker 5v battery to Regen and the noise floor dropped, and things started to sound good again.

 

I am using JCat USB card with no power coming to Regen and I have blocked pin 1 on hard adapter, so no power is going to DAC.

 

Anyone tried battery to Regen? I will turn down my Hynes to 5v and see what happens, I do not know it was the voltage or the difference between LPS vs battery.

[satfrat]

Received my Regen last Monday, connected it to the system with a Paul Hynes SR3 turned down to 7.5v. Noise level increased compared to what it was before Regen. I thought let it burn for few days. Nothing changed until today while the system was running 24 hours, so I wanted to see what was going on, and connected an Anker 5v battery to Regen and the noise floor dropped, and things started to sound good again.

 

I am using JCat USB card with no power coming to Regen and I have blocked pin 1 on hard adapter, so no power is going to DAC.

 

Anyone tried battery to Regen? I will turn down my Hynes to 5v and see what happens, I do not know it was the voltage or the difference between LPS vs battery.

 

Did you bother to try the Regen with the supplied Mean Well SMPS? If I had encountered what you did with my SR3, that's the first thing I would have done but then again I would have used the SMPS first anyways so to compare the improvement gain when using the Hynes PS with a well broken-in Regen.

 

I have a SR3-12, is there a noticeable voltage adjustment inside that makes for an easy adjustment? I've never opened mine so I don't have a clue but would love to dial mine down to 7.5v just to see what the improvement gain might be.

[Angular Mo]

My head hurts and am confused, having received delivery today of the Amber Regen device; two topics of my inquiry......power supply and USB cable.

 

1) power supply, at an affordable price; iFi Power or the 30W Teradak? or another suggestion. Would the Furutech wall outlet make this point moot? I was told to read post 2183, but I don't know what to conclude from it.

 

2) USB cable; data-only cable? Y-cable, and use date-side only, or a good-quality cable, and tape over the power connections?

 

Well, I am using the Geek Pulse DAC/Amp, and, IIRC, it requires a power handshake and afterwards that can be dropped.

[BobL]

.....

 

I have a SR3-12, is there a noticeable voltage adjustment inside that makes for an easy adjustment? I've never opened mine so I don't have a clue but would love to dial mine down to 7.5v just to see what the improvement gain might be.

 

The SR5 has a trimpot, accessible if you take off the cover, which gives you something like 1v swing, and the SR3 is probably similar. If you want larger changes it has to go back to Paul, who can do it, but at the cost of smaller o/p current.

However, I'm not sure why you would want to reduce the 12v unless the Regen is getting hot. Some time back John commented that a higher voltage might be beneficial so long as the dac does not take much/any current. For me, 9v from the little Teradak is a lot better than 7.5v from the SMPS, but 12 v from the SR5 is much better again. It's a bit difficult to separate voltage from quality of supply here; the people who can really tell us are the JS2 owners.

[satfrat]

The SR5 has a trimpot, accessible if you take off the cover, which gives you something like 1v swing, and the SR3 is probably similar. If you want larger changes it has to go back to Paul, who can do it, but at the cost of smaller o/p current.

However, I'm not sure why you would want to reduce the 12v unless the Regen is getting hot. Some time back John commented that a higher voltage might be beneficial so long as the dac does not take much/any current. For me, 9v from the little Teradak is a lot better than 7.5v from the SMPS, but 12 v from the SR5 is much better again. It's a bit difficult to separate voltage from quality of supply here; the people who can really tell us are the JS2 owners.

 

My Empirical Off-Ramp 3 does draw current so no way will I use a 12v PS, 9v maybe. I sent Paul Hynes an email so I should find out real soon about the SR3. Considering tho that I'm loving the Regen's performance with the Mean Well SMPS, using a linear PS is more out of my own curiosity than it is necessary.

 

Thanks for the info.

[BobL]

 

2) USB cable; data-only cable? Y-cable, and use date-side only, or a good-quality cable, and tape over the power connections?

 

Well, I am using the Geek Pulse DAC/Amp, and, IIRC, it requires a power handshake and afterwards that can be dropped.

On cables, see post 754

"Amber upgrade with Supra is magic."

This seems to be pretty general, even though the Supra was not good with the earlier Green.

[lotriwer]

Has anyone tried it with TotalDac USB?

[Superdad]

Has anyone tried it with TotalDac USB?

 

Several right here:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/uptone-audio-regen-22803/index36.html#post424629

 

and

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f6-dac-digital-analog-conversion/uptone-audio-regen-listening-impressions-24078/index9.html#post420474

[lotriwer]

Several right here:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f10-music-servers/uptone-audio-regen-22803/index36.html#post424629

 

and

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f6-dac-digital-analog-conversion/uptone-audio-regen-listening-impressions-24078/index9.html#post420474

 

Thanks!

[lmitche]

Could you please go into a lot more detail about what you are hearing that you are attributing to "beating"? Yes the clocks are separate and close, but that is the normal mode of operation for USB. ALL USB systems work that way. Every USB device has a local clock in its receiver that will be slightly off from the clock in the transmitter, they are designed to work that way. So when you plug your DAC into a computer without a REGEN you have exactly the same issue, the clock in the DAC will be slightly off from the clock in the computer. One or two REGENs in the path does not change the behavior, each entity in the path will have its own clock which will have a SLIGHTLY different frequency than what is up/down stream, that is the way the system is designed to work.

 

What you are hearing is most likely caused by something else.

 

John S.

 

Hi John,

 

Yes, you are right, it is likely to be something besides the two REGENS. That's why I pulled the green REGEN to see if the problem re-occurs in it's absence. Stay tuned.

 

Two different things seem to happen. First the sound gets muted, as though the signal is being cancelled. Powering the first green REGEN down/up seems to fix this. Second is a fixed periodic gap in the track, occurring for the length of the track. The period varies by track resolution. Twice the resolution, half the period. There is about a 5 second period length on redbook. Stopping play and restarting usually fixes this.

 

This is all with an Auralic Vega DAC running in EXACT mode which samples the USB at 10x the speed of it's slower AUTO mode. So please consider this a corner case. On my Vega this mode has always been flaky. Auralic original positioned EXACT mode as THE major distinguishing feature of this DAC, and then subsequently declared it an experimental mode, so it is unsupported. EXACT mode does sound significantly better, when it works.

 

I know there are others that used the REGEN to tame EXACT mode on the Vega DAC. Unfortunately this hasn't happened here.

 

Are these the details you were looking for? Many thanks for your attention!

 

Larry

[Jud]

My head hurts and am confused, having received delivery today of the Amber Regen device; two topics of my inquiry......power supply and USB cable.

 

1) power supply, at an affordable price; iFi Power or the 30W Teradak? or another suggestion. Would the Furutech wall outlet make this point moot? I was told to read post 2183, but I don't know what to conclude from it.

 

2) USB cable; data-only cable? Y-cable, and use date-side only, or a good-quality cable, and tape over the power connections?

 

Well, I am using the Geek Pulse DAC/Amp, and, IIRC, it requires a power handshake and afterwards that can be dropped.

 

Life is more simple than this.

 

Power supply: The included MeanWell is very nice. The iPower is slightly better; the Chinese supply on eBay you were directed to is slightly better yet. Small differences, not night and day.

 

Cable: Use what you have for a nice improvement from what you were hearing before. Other relatively low cost well thought of cables are the Supra and the Mapleshade Clearlink Plus. No reason to do anything to the cables, just use them as is.

 

See? Simple! Now you can spend your time listening to music.

[wwaldmanfan]

Life is more simple than this.

 

Power supply: The included MeanWell is very nice. The iPower is slightly better; the Chinese supply on eBay you were directed to is slightly better yet. Small differences, not night and day.

 

Cable: Use what you have for a nice improvement from what you were hearing before. Other relatively low cost well thought of cables are the Supra and the Mapleshade Clearlink Plus. No reason to do anything to the cables, just use them as is.

 

See? Simple! Now you can spend your time listening to music.

 

The Supra USB is a good cable; I have one. However, I have gone back to my Kimber Kable B-Bus Cu (ferrites removed), which on my rig sounds just a little more lively. A slight difference between the two, commesurate with the price.

 

Kimber USB Cu

[4est]

Did you notice much of a difference when you removed the ferrite beads? I've one around here, and maybe it would be worth a try...

The Supra USB is a good cable; I have one. However, I have gone back to my Kimber Kable B-Bus Cu (ferrites removed), which on my rig sounds just a little more lively. A slight difference between the two, commesurate with the price.

 

Kimber USB Cu

[Pol]

Has anyone tried it with TotalDac USB?

I do.

i have D1 tube DAC and TotalDac USB cable.

It's really good.