New HDPLEX 200W LPS

[FredericV]

buyer beware

We had a lot of problems with this brand, mainly with the 160 VA models:

- two 160VA models started to smoke, because of no short circuit protection at the time on the 5V and 9V rails. This design mistake was confirmed by the vendor

The PSU was getting so hot internally that the insulation of the ground wire, which touched other components, was melting!
 

In Europe, PSU's have to be able to handle a short circuit without such issues. When TÜV tested, the PSU's are even tested while being short circuited, and the fuse cannot even be blown if the PSU needs to pass the test. These tests are very expensive, and it's obvious they saved on certification.

 

-  this happened at our dealers, one dealer actually wanted to stop with our brand because of this, the other upgraded to a much better Dutch brand, which never had any issues. So the damages caused by HDPLEX are real. Unfortunately they are not located in Europe, so making a legal case is very difficult for the damages caused to us.

 

- the backpanel on the 160VA model would vary with each new batch, making documentation horrible

- between models, the 12V and 19V outputs would be swapped, so dealers not reading the bundled wiring guide, and wiring from memory, would risk putting 19V onto a 12V DC converter

 

- 9V and 5V output terminals can't handle much torque from attaching GX12 cables, so the output terminal would rotate and the internal pins would come loose from the PCB, see the PCB at the right:

so we had several PSU's where we had to resolder the GX12 connectors
 

- front panels often had small scratches, so we had a lot of replament panels sent to us - we even still have a box full of HDPLEX replacement front panels

- fluctuating voltages at the output, e.g. 9V would start to drift down to a point where the high-end sotm card would go below the minimum voltage, but also in the opposite direction, where the output would suddenly do 20V instead 9V -> bye bye expensive USB card. We also had models where 9V would become 12V:



- with other models, the 12V and 19V would go unstable, and the server would just go out after something like 45 minutes

- with one model, cooling paste was clearly visible at the side



- with one model, there was a bad soldering on a pcb, where the soldered wire would touch the chassis, therefore putting 19V back on the chassis -> we actually destroyed a motherboard. Opened PSU, removed PCB, cut the bad soldered wire sticking out, put some isolation in it, and the PSU now works again. But imagine this was a non-technical customer and 19V would leak onto his other appliances.

- bundled wires where + and - were swapped !! later acknowledged by the vendor via email

If you did not test, your DC converter would be fried and potentially your music server as well.

- PSU's getting very hot / overheating / loud buzzing

We stopped working with this brand because of the continuous QA issues at the time. Once we just got an email back that he just fired his QA:

 

We recalled all HDPLEX supplies and opened every supply to check for mistakes. This was a very expensive operation and I would not recommend to work with HDPLEX unless you know what you're doing and have the technical skills to inspect and measure the PSU. Yes they are cheap compared to other brands, but the supplies that we received from HDPLEX where mostly faulty, or started to fail within the warranty period.

From the models we received, only his very old 110VA supply never had any issues.

While the vendor now claims all the issues are gone with the 200VA models, it's still a chinese product with a questionable reliability history.
 

This all lead to selecting a new PSU vendor which does not have these mistakes. So far with this new vendor we had only had one faulty PSU in the field, and the vendor replaced the PSU within the same day when the issue was found.

We also sent an official complaint about HDPLEX to the Belgian economic inspection, as anyone importing this brand is putting his customer at risk. Unless off course, all the former issue are automagically solved and no new issues are introduced with newer models.

In Belgium they take faulty & dangerous power supplies very serious.

[FredericV]

I still have a 200VA model which was sent in Nov 2017 as a replacement for some older 160VA going bad.

Today looking at some old stock, I finally opened the 200VA psu box and noticed the 12V rail from factory is completely non-working.

 

All the other rails work fine:

 

But 12V is an important voltage for us, and again this shows what QA you can expect from HDPLEX.
With our current supplier (not hdplex), every supply is tested before shipping.

So no more China PSU's for us.

[FredericV]

15 hours ago, shadowlight said:

 

Can you share your supplier's information?

Sbooster BOtW mk2 is one of the options we use.

Never runs hot, low voltage drop and very reliable. Better sounding than every HDPLEX we had so far.

[FredericV]

41 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

Hi Frederic:

It is customary here at CA for members of the trade (dealers and manufacturers) to list their industry affiliation in their signature and/or next to their user name.

Thanks,

—Alex C.

 

Check first link in signature

[FredericV]

With the information presented, it's clear the HDPLEX is not a true linear PSU.

[FredericV]

28 minutes ago, LTG2010 said:

Even better use all four rails of the HDPlex to power the board, 3.3v, 5v & 12V for the 24pin and 12V (you can get it configured 2x12v in lieu of 19v) for the 4 pin. Now we are in high end server territory. No need for the DC/atx converter.

and then one of those rails start to fluctuate and the motherboard is gone .... I have several of these HDPLEX supplies where the voltages started to drift upwards, or downwards
 

 

 

[FredericV]

14 minutes ago, LTG2010 said:

I thought this is a new improved model. I had the old model a few years ago and was pretty solid.

we bundled a lot of variants of the 110VA up to 200 VA models and everything in between, and the only stable ones which never failed were the 110VA's which are physically smaller then the later 160 and 200VA models, all the other models had issues

with our current oem supplier, we had one failure and it was solved within 1 day! the issue never occurred again
with hdplex, we spent a lot of time swapping bad supplies, and often the replacements were also bad

I still have a brand new 200VA hdplex replacement and it's also bad. Just read this topic again.

If HDPLEX passes TÜV certifcation I will reconsider my opinion about hdplex.

[FredericV]

15 hours ago, rickca said:

It's clear from your earlier post that you are talking about a 'brand new replacement' for an older HDPLEX supply ... you do not have one of the latest HDPLEX 200W LPS which is the topic of this thread.

 

You got this replacement supply back in November 2017.  The latest HDPLEX 200W LPS didn't start shipping until November 2018.

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/46748-new-hdplex-200w-lps/?do=findComment&comment=894438

 

My point is: don't be naive and assume everything is automagically fixed.

 

[FredericV]

5 hours ago, Lebouwsky said:

For anyone who is interested in using the hdplex 200w as an “atx-ish” power supply (like @LTG2010 has suggested): a cable like this is needed to connect to the 4 rails. I have asked Ghent if they’re capable of building such a cable and will keep you guys informed. My goal is to implement JSSG360 with an as low as possible AWG quality cable

 

ATX also specifies negative voltages on the connector:

https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/blog/convert-atx-psu-to-bench-supply.html

 

Pin 12 and 18

[FredericV]

On 6/3/2019 at 9:42 AM, PeterSt said:

Some people in here think that Amir doesn't know what to use his toys for (I am among them). These are not the people who don't hear a difference in anything whatsoever (like Amir himself and unlike me).

 

As long as every difference is rejected with a "but you won't hear that anyway", then stop posting this BS. Or give it to archimago etc.

Or flush the toilet harder, if you know what I mean ...

I respect the guy, he was the one responsible for introducing room correction into windows vista, and it's bass mgt & home theater features. He knows what he's doing. Those threads were on avsforum where we even discussed how to hack the registry so that certain cards could run these features.

HD plex are not true linear power supplies, and they use a shared transformer for several rails which is not the most ideal design choice. Furtthermore, wasn't there a DC - DC converter inside the latest PSU? So I'm not surprised what he measured.

[FredericV]

14 hours ago, PeterSt said:

Yes. And if you really followed those (especially the one about Audio Processing in Vista explained) then you know we don't like each other.

 

I really did, how else could I come up with this ?

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MMDevices\Audio\Render\{3956a86f-4b80-4013-be4d-879a4365a166}\FxProperties]
"{d04e05a6-594b-4fb6-a80d-01af5eed7d1d},0"="{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}"
"{d04e05a6-594b-4fb6-a80d-01af5eed7d1d},4"="Auzen X-Meridian 7.1"
"{d04e05a6-594b-4fb6-a80d-01af5eed7d1d},9"="SpeakerHp"
"{d04e05a6-594b-4fb6-a80d-01af5eed7d1d},1"="{62DC1A93-AE24-464C-A43E-452F824C4250}"
"{d04e05a6-594b-4fb6-a80d-01af5eed7d1d},2"="{637C490D-EEE3-4C0A-973F-371958802DA2}"
"{d04e05a6-594b-4fb6-a80d-01af5eed7d1d},3"="{5860E1C5-F95C-4a7a-8EC8-8AEF24F379A1}"
"{1da5d803-d492-4edd-8c23-e0c0ffee7f0e},5"=dword:00000000
"{1864a4e0-efc1-45e6-a675-5786cbf3b9f0},4"=hex:03,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
  00,00
"{61e8acb9-f04f-4f40-a65f-8f49fab3ba10},4"=hex:03,00,63,00,50,00,00,00,50,00,\
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"{1b5c2483-0839-4523-ba87-95f89d27bd8c},3"=hex:03,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
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"{73ae880e-8258-4e57-b85f-7daa6b7d5ef0},3"=hex:03,00,63,00,01,00,00,00,01,00,\
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"{01fb17e3-796c-4451-8163-68cdc1321a60},3"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
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"{f311cdc7-f45f-4eb7-a864-9dc1aeeb7e6d},3"=hex:41,00,00,00,00,00,00,00
"{5b64fcb1-8c32-4844-9dcb-15a45df000fc},3"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
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"{fc52a749-4be9-4510-896e-966ba6525980},3"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
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"{9c00eeed-edce-4cd8-ae08-cb05e8ef57a0},3"=hex:03,00,63,00,04,00,00,00,04,00,\
  00,00
"{1b5c2483-0839-4523-ba87-95f89d27bd8c},1599"=hex:03,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
  00,00,00
"{73ae880e-8258-4e57-b85f-7daa6b7d5ef0},1599"=hex:03,00,63,00,01,00,00,00,01,\
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"{fc52a749-4be9-4510-896e-966ba6525980},1599"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
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"{9c00eeed-edce-4cd8-ae08-cb05e8ef57a0},1599"=hex:03,00,63,00,04,00,00,00,04,\
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"{1864a4e0-efc1-45e6-a675-5786cbf3b9f0},1599"=hex:03,00,63,00,01,00,00,00,01,\
  00,00,00
"{61e8acb9-f04f-4f40-a65f-8f49fab3ba10},1599"=hex:03,00,63,00,50,00,00,00,50,\
  00,00,00
"{b1103003-c191-4275-9fa0-8c282c724bce},1599"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
  00,00,00
"{c816a1a7-a119-48a5-9ad2-85451f4b5a2e},1599"=hex:0b,00,63,00,ff,ff,00,00,ff,\
  ff,00,00
"{01fb17e3-796c-4451-8163-68cdc1321a60},1599"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
  00,00,00
"{f311cdc7-f45f-4eb7-a864-9dc1aeeb7e6d},1599"=hex:41,00,00,00,00,00,00,00
"{5b64fcb1-8c32-4844-9dcb-15a45df000fc},1599"=hex:0b,00,63,00,00,00,00,00,00,\
  00,00,00

 

[FredericV]

1 hour ago, PeterSt said:

 

I see that you were practicing with MQA already back then. 

Damn I should have obfuscated that string. Now you don't need an MQA decoder to deblur my secret ;)