A Journey into Setting Up an Audiophile Desktop System (Part LXVII)
Accepting change is a lifelong journey. This kind of entails accepting the change of your audio system, in a way, or, one can use it as a training vehicle or domain to foster the enlightenment.
Change came in the form of an SMPS power supply from the audiophile person in magdeburg, who sent me a device for testing. It is built using quite sophisticated methods to reduce ripple and HF noise due to the switching.
The other one i have currently in use is the Plixir BDC MK1.
Now sometimes, when change comes, it is not easy to tell if it brings useful alteration of existing structures, or not. This is one of those cases.
The signature of the Plixir can be described as the company describes itself: true sound — i was wondering if the sound can be any better since it sounds really realistic. There is some thickness in the low end, but hard to tell if that is in the music, or in the room.
There are some differences between the two devices, but they are rather subtle.
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Plixir BDC
- Realistic texture, timbre and tone
- Rich tonal color
- Balanced
- ‘Music as itself’
- Higher dissipation (<30%)
- Musical flow more realistic
- More black
Custom Highend SMPS
- Very fast ∆A (even though i do not exactly understand how)
- Pale coloring
- Smeared contours
- Thinned mid and low end (not sure, but this might be ‘correct’ in terms of measurement, but is not in terms of acoustic representation)
- Lack of pressure in the lower mid range (200–500Hz)
- ‘Music as an image’
- Lower dissipation (<20%)
- Energy flow more even
- More air
So i need to see how this impression manifests. And now, a few days later, it did. I cannot deny that the SMPS supply sounds very interesting. But ultimately, the description above led me to believe that in the current state, a LPS like the plixir is the better and more credible option.
I blew up 2 fuses due to now knowing that the SMPS has very high inrush current, so i blew up 2 fuses there below 2.5A T. But that is OK, i learned some things and reshuffled the system a little bit, regardless the power supply topic.
I know there is a statement version, next to the mk ii version of the bdc. It is quite expensive, but i somewhat believe that the signal path is the ‘holy grail’, somehow, in terms of power supply. The difference is that the statement version contains a truely symmetrical toroid transformer, while the elite versions are only partially symmetrical.
Very interesting experiments overall, but one case where the change did not bring any significant improvement in the end.
