In effect it is, the people spending 100K on speakers are quite willing to buy a $50K component with a PSU that’s probably 80% of the BOM in it.
Sure people buying Topping and SMSL are reticent to upgrade power supplies, but they won’t upgrade DAC’s either.
A lot of this hobby if you come in at the entry level is justifying to yourself that some thing is worth what it costs. There is rightly a lot of concern about “snake oil”, though there is a lot less in the industry than many think.
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fully agree…I did several tests on my Niagara 3000 with different power cables (was not over-crazy with price ranges: €300 - 1.500) and it has in my chain very-less impact (lumin u2 …than replaced it last week with Ferrum Hypsos…bummmm, surprise)
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or go completly crazy 
STROMTANK - German Power Tank
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Which is why my jaw dropped when I experienced how much improvement I got plugging a Mojo V1 into a $220 dollar DDC that was already connected to a decent LPS. The hobby is about budgets and tiers but IMO it’s just as foolish to buy into a Topping and SMSL tier world and reject all notion that anything more expensive is people throwing their money away.
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Peer pressure is a strong thing, we’re off topic here, but there is a poster over on another forum, who posted a review of an A&S Mogwai with detailed descriptions in how it differed from his current amp. Then bought an A/B switch and subsequently recanted everything as placebo.
That is what your up against, I went through my “what the artist intended” phase largely because of the group I was hanging around with at the time. the groups are just bigger and easier to hang around with on the internet.
Back on topic, I do like that Robb Watts at Chord sticks to his guns on the quality of SMPS power supplies. When people compare SMPS to LPS they are rarely if ever comparing equivalent $$ to $$.
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Yes that’s a big thing, it’s like when people compare a massively expensive turntable setup to a entry high end dac and then proclaim that vinyl is infinitely better. Or vice versa. It’s not a fair comparison unless they are both equal levels of quality, there’s clearly merit to both sides, both can be great, both can be not great
Wow
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That has the best name and looks amazingly retro future. I don’t care if it does anything 
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Honestly, I’m impressed and quite happy that he was willing to admit it to himself and publicly.
Rather than calling it peer pressure (since he did go against the flow ultimately) maybe it reflects more on how easily the mind can be influenced by certain expectations. Also calls into question what we (I) can do to avoid it or if it’s even entirely possible to avoid it.
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Hah I did! The components are basically pennies. I had the circuitboards printed in China - 10 for $4.95 with free shipping 
The components needed to stuff the boards (all available on Digikey, Mouser, etc.) are actually pennies if bought in the quantities a manufacturer would buy.
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The peers I was referring to weren’t the site it was posted on.
But sure I’m not attached to the name, people are influenced by everything they hear and somethings are more convincing than others.
I was just blown away with that particular case, because it was rather extreme in that someone was willing to disregard all personal experience and write it off as placebo based on a flawed testing methodology that had been sold to them.
If your ever bored there is a lot of research into how to pose information (true or otherwise) in a way that people accept it without additional supporting evidence, it’s quite fascinating what causes people to associate statements with belief, and most of it makes no sense logically.
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You’re right. Been thinking about it a bit more and it doesn’t really matter. Gut-instinct told me it doesn’t quite fit since it seems to me to be an internal drive as much as external, but that’s not quite right either. Peer pressure works fine 
Okay, now I’m confused and may have misunderstood. You’re saying his impressions actually were correct and the A/B testing was the wrong method to use for testing? Cause I thought peer pressure got to him to form a certain opinion, but then later realized that his mind was projecting his impressions.
That sounds great. I am quite fond of figuring out how people’s minds work. Any good tips on where to look?
This here is key and it’s part of the reason I went down the path of defending SMPS. The youtube video above is all LPS, indicating incorrectly that they are inherently better. Benchmark for example use SMPSs exclusively and are well regarded.
The reason SMPS power supplies have a bad rap is that they are used in all race-to-the-bottom products. Because it’s easier (and smaller) to make a cheap SMPS than a cheap LPS.
But if you want quality power, you can do it either way.
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The title of the thread belies the fact that (as much as I hate to say this) everything matters in the hobby. Even the time of day you’re listening to your music.
Getting back on topic here though, I’m curious to know what folks are using? And if given some of the chit chatter here they’d be willing to go hunt for an Hypsos or something of high quality out in the used market to try for themselves?
I think my biggest surprise isn’t so much as the power making a difference but that all I did was power up a DDC with a good power supply. Not a DAC, not an amp… a measly LKS USB-100 DDC and it felt like I’d upgraded something major in the existing chain.
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I use Meanwell PSUs. Like the kind that come with a Pi2AES. They’re medical grade (meaning they emit minimal emi and other radiation), they’re very stable in voltage output (very tight regulation) and, I plop one of those filters I linked to above on them. Some of the more industrial (bigger) Meanwell units are used by builders on their class A First Watt clone amps.
There are these supplies here that I’m looking at trying but they’re a bit more DIY (and also I haven’t seen any measurements yet) than what most want to deal with. You can run a proper class A/B speaker amp off them.
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The vast majority of components I own just have IEC plugs, so I haven’t had a ton of opportunity to play with swapping around power supplies. My RNHP is still running stock, my microRendu is using a SGC power supply just because that seemed like the standard one people use (either that or an UpTone one), and I don’t have a lot else!
The most recent SMPS I went out of my way to buy was a Triad supply for my MiSTer (FPGA retro game emulator).
This is a good rabbit hole topic for someone that wants to kill a few hours of reading/watching. This TT video was the first time I’d run into the concept of Bayes thinking and to be honest, it was surprising to me that it wasn’t a common type thought process. Being in the sciences or engineering or simply being curious about how the world works leads someone precisely to that Bayes rule of taking in new evidence and changing your line of thinking based on the new evidence.
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When I had my Monolith Liquid Platinum amp I used an off the shelf meanwell power supply for it, it was cheap, about $25 bucks, industrial with just a swiss cheese metal case and you had to screw your own AC in and DC out cables to it. I’m assuming a solution that you’re sharing is wired in line with the DC out or is it wired in the AC in before or after the transformer?
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Again off topic, but
I think his initial impressions were probably correct in this case. Where did the detail in the initial impressions come from otherwise?
The peer pressure in this case comes from sites promoting no difference in Amps/DAC’s, and suggesting that the only valuable measurement is FR and that fast A/B switching is a valid way to compare amps.
A/B switching can have it’s place, but it’s extremely difficult to hear anything but significant FR or volume changes on a fast A/B switch, you really can only instantaneously identify changes in the 1dB range.
If your familiar with the components, the differences are usually apparent in 10’s of seconds, if you’re not it can take minutes of listening to really understand what you are hearing. I can give anecdotal examples with comparable components I’ve owned.
But if you just keep flipping a switch expecting the components to sound radically different they won’t (unless one is just bad).
The differences were talking about are tiny and they are part of the perception rather than hearing, by which I mean the differences are more apparent in the way we interpret them than the are in the changes to the wiggly lines we measure.
Think about how little actual noise an average power supply can introduce to a circuit over a really good one, or the differences a cable can make, they are utterly tiny, there is no way they make a dB’s or even 0.1 dB’s difference anywhere, and yet I would argue that I can hear changes from a power cable, interconnect, or power supply.
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Yes I ran a cheap switching unit on my optical rendu while I was waiting for the linear supply I bought for it, and it was an obvious audible difference.
Power cables are still the one I can’t get over, I swapped some power cables around recently and eliminated a cheap cable on the Rendu PSU, that difference was surprisingly significant, and I never expect those changes to be anything significant for some reason.
On the topic of PSUs, I yesterday ran some tests on integrated DC-DC converters for potential use in a project of mine.
In my specific case, a Traco TBA2 in the 0512 version (meaning 5V input, 12V output).
Spec has it at 120mV peak to peak ripple at 80% load, which it did pass in my limited test and sample size of 2.
What it did not do is keep voltage regulation within 3% (red in the picture below means failed):
Ripple looks like I can get it in check fairly easily though:
At 50% load:
At 100% load:
I think I have the wall wart from my ART Headamp4 somewhere. That thing drifts less wildly over its load curve, does not block any incoming noise either. Plugging in a known-wonky USB-charger next to it has two spikes from the charger show up on the scope.
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