[Rclark]

Neat!

 MGalusha, if I may ask, can you guage just how much of an improvement there was in your dac?

[Russtafarian]

I'm considering putting one in my linear PS I built for my SBT.  Installation looks straight-forward.  The music rails are less expensive than the slipstream bybees so it could be a very cost effective PS upgrade.  If I like what it does for my SBT PS, I'll probably try music rails in some of my other power supplies: disc player, phono pre, preamp, etc.

Anyone else try these yet? I'm considering having my dac upgraded, rather than sell it.

Putting a slipstream bybee on the 5v and 3.3v dc lines feeding the CS4398 dac chip in my player made a significant improvement.  So installing a $50 music rail in your DAC would be worth a try if you can do it yourself. 

[jtwrace]

it's a case of want to improve performance to possibly keep long term.
 

Right.  My comment goes for this too...I don't think it's the change that determines whether you keep it long term or not. 

[Rclark]

Why not? is it only a very minor upgrade after all? I spoke to a gentleman today who talked about being able to install the rails and possibly upgrade the capacitors and maybe look at some other options.

 Like I said, with the addition of the items I've run in the system lately, the dac sounded great, so my line of thinking was, keep up with the theme, and do something for the dac too. If the critical weak pieces in the dac can be remedied, why not?

 What determines whether I keep it long term or not is whether the sq of the dac can be brought up to a level of the other gear, without breaking the bank.

[Gopher]

It doesn't seem like many folks have much to say on the Music Rails, but I took the plunge and sent in my Bolder PSU for a Railing and am looking forward to seeing how it will sound with my Bolder'ed Squeezebox Touch.

Question:  Does anyone with experience think it will be too much of a good thing having Music Rails in my Squeezebox psu going into a Bybee Purifier conditioner?

[jtwrace]

It doesn't seem like many folks have much to say on the Music Rails, but I took the plunge and sent in my Bolder PSU for a Railing and am looking forward to seeing how it will sound with my Bolder'ed Squeezebox Touch.

Question:  Does anyone with experience think it will be too much of a good thing having Music Rails in my Squeezebox psu going into a Bybee Purifier conditioner?

No.  Don't see how limiting noise could hurt.

[mgalusha]

MGalusha, if I may ask, can you guage just how much of an improvement there was in your dac?

Sorry, just now saw this. Well it's been a while but the change was enough to justify the cost and effort IMO. I am not good at assigning change percentages to something as subjective as audio but maybe 10%? Not really sure how one quantifies that. For me it's a matter of does it cause me to fall deeper into the music or want to turn the system down or off. This falls into the fall deeper category.

[mgalusha]

Question:  Does anyone with experience think it will be too much of a good thing having Music Rails in my Squeezebox psu going into a Bybee Purifier conditioner?

I think you will be fine. The music rails are an active device while the regular Bybee purifiers are passive and they do different things to the sound IMO.

My DAC has a music rail and is plugged into one of the Bybee conditioners.

mike



Disclaimer: I build the Bybee power conditioners, so my views may be tinted.

[Bill Baker]

We did quite a bit of testing with the Music Rails prior to using them in our upper end preamp. As Wayne said early on, they are not a plug and play devise. There is a voltage drop which has to be taken into consideration and if using for anything higher than 30V, there is a series of resistors that have to be determined to allow the Music Rails to function properly.

That being said, modification will likely have to be made to the power supply to maintain the proper voltage for the circuit.

Do they work? Yes. Regardless of how quite and noise free a component already is, the installation of the Music Rails did provide a better sense of blackness to the background (at least in our testing).

[jtwrace]

I had a member over today to listen to my system and he was nice enough to bring a Music Rail with him for me to see.  He also brought along the Parts ConneXion PCB.  Very cool product.  Now I just need to decide what to try it in.   

[Soundminded]

Bybee's device is no mystery. It's based on filtering noise by isolating the noise component and adding it out of phase to the power source whether on AC or DC power circuits including on AC neutrals. It is explained in his patent and at first glance it looks like it should work effectively. It is conceptually similar to the way line interactive type UPSs work.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=gerCAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

The only question is whether or not similar results could be obtained more cost effectively by using larger power supply capacitors alone for filtering noise. You might say that however much noise a conventional filter capacitor eliminates Bybee's circuit could reduce it further. However there is a point of diminishing returns, a point of no further audible benefit, and a point at whcih Bybee's device sees noise levels so small it won't work either. Looks to me more like a matter of economics than anything else. This is the first time I've seen how it works and I must admit is looks clever.

[jtwrace]

However there is a point of diminishing returns, a point of no further audible benefit, and a point at whcih Bybee's device sees noise levels so small it won't work either.

Do you think it can be over done to the point where it hurts the sonics?

[Soundminded]

Do you think it can be over done to the point where it hurts the sonics?

No, it will just reach a point where further improvement will have no audible effect. This should be easily seen by putting two of them in series. The second one probably won't offer any further improvement over just one. It should be pointed out that this is not a substitute for a voltage regulator,it can't prevent the quiescent operating voltages on transistors from drifting with changes to the input voltage or heavy draw on the power supply output relative to its capacity. It is one fix for one potential problem. The degree to which it will offer audible improvement will depend on what level of noise is present in the first place. It will also have its own limits as to what kinds of noise it can reduce and what it can't but it could be considerable. If Bybee were to publish complete specifications for it that would be one of them.

Unfortunately it cannot be adapted to canceling harmonics on shared neutrals for commercial three phase power for at least two reasons. It can't be scaled up economically to the power levels required, up to hundreds of amps, and if it ever failed and open circuited it could result in severe damage or destruction of the load equipment. Other seemingly clever ideas such as zig-zag transformers that work under ideal laboratory conditions won't work particularly effectively in the real world either but people do still buy and install them.  There's far more money in selling solutions that don't work well or at all to solve industiral problems than there are for consumer equipment problems.

[mintzar]

I tested them in various DC power supplies for a few months. Different voltages, currents, grounding layouts, parts, cascading them, etc.

At first impression (after break in) they seem to improve dynamics, but I found that this was actually caused by an increased noise floor and that noise exaggerates the leading edge of transients. This makes the MR sound impressive, but not accurate.

I tested them in both digital and analog circuits. They don't filter out the right spectrum of noise to be the most effective solution on digital. Though since their price is in line with an expensive cap that's something to consider also.

The music rails are hyper sensitive to how they are grounded in the circuit. Which parts you use including film caps and resistors can make or break the sound. Whether you AC couple or not also makes a difference and what film caps you use to do so is an important consideration.

For modification and upgrading switchmode power supplies they are extremely cost effective. As a replacement for a good linear power supply they don't come close.

I have circuit diagrams somewhere for what the MR is. It's a discrete opamp/transistor-based fixed voltage regulator similar to what Stax and Kubota were designing back in the 70s.

It works by dividing noise over a certain amount and feeding it back through the circuit to smooth out ripple. I believe bybee even says they're just a "more
Compact alternative to several large capacitor networks".

Just my take on em.

[jtwrace]

For modification and upgrading switchmode power supplies they are extremely cost effective. As a replacement for a good linear power supply they don't come close.

What about adding them to a linear power supply?

[mintzar]

That's where I tested them first and in my new iterations of the Kora and Kalos LPSUs. They made the sound much worse rather than better. I was able to use them to improve an old Jensen 4-pole supply I used to build, but it only makes my new designs worse no matter what I tried.

But it will improve some LPSUs I'm sure. A pretty good $300 power supply could be made using them.

[Soundminded]

That's where I tested them first and in my new iterations of the Kora and Kalos LPSUs. They made the sound much worse rather than better. I was able to use them to improve an old Jensen 4-pole supply I used to build, but it only makes my new designs worse no matter what I tried.

But it will improve some LPSUs I'm sure. A pretty good $300 power supply could be made using them.

The problem with all circuits that rely on phase cancellation is that they must be adjusted to perfection in each case to perform to their potential. In some cases they are with spectacular results. However, misapplied they create more noise and distortion than without them. This is because the out of phase noise component is not exactly 180 degrees out of phase and doesn't cancel the noise but adds to it or it is too strong and overcompensates. This IMO is why so many wanabe audio amplifier designers have condemned negative feedback, they don't know how to apply it correctly. It's no simple matter, the equations are very complex and difficult to apply even for experienced electrical enginners.

When the 1000 mfd 100 volt filter capacitor in my HK Citation 11 preamp died, the only thing I had around was a couple of 4800 mfd 75 volt caps so I wired them in series which effectively resulted in 2400 mfds and I think it works better than ever. Engineers set goals for performance that can be measured and a determination made as to whether or not their design met those goals. Often there is more than one way to achive the same goal. While Bybee's circuit may deal with one aspect of inadequate power supply performance it doesn't deal with all of them and it may not be the most cost effective way to improve even just noise and ripple which are its targets. As no electronic component can be better than its power supply, it's unfortunate that those supplied even with so called high end equipment can be improved upon. If there was only two specifications I could get for a piece of audio equipmen I might prefer size and weight as an indicator of how large the power transformer and filter caps are compared to other equipment of the same type.
 

[kyrill]

I have them in a very simple circuit only to provide stable noise free power to my DEXA super clock 0.2 ps) after a Guido tent pws. I agree that grounding is very important. The clock + Bybee make my DEQX sound  more musical than  but equally revealing as the Metrum Octave DAC which I own as well

[jtwrace]

I now have a Bybee MR in my Mac Mini LPSU.   

Really liking what it does.