Hi Zoom,
Reading your enthusiastic post about the Jitterbug persuaded me to finally try one. 39 euro can't cause any misfortune...
I use the exact same setup as you, feeding my BDP1 with the Usb HDD's hooked up to a usb Hub with its own (not yet linear) power supply.
And thats why my next question would be what kind of power supply you use.
I have several devices using a cheap provided wall wart, and to try and isolate these as much as possible, they're powered on their own dedicated power strip, fed from another wall outlet than my main setup.
Still, inevitably they're connected to that main setup. Not only the network interfaces (which don't bother me that much since they're supposed to be isolated transports). Neither do the optical ones worry me. More so do the HDMI and digital coax connections. Think of a cable setup box, or an AppleTV for that matter. Think of USB devices, as my fake BOT drive connected to the BDP. (will test that too with the jitterbug to see if any progress is to me heard.)
All in all, please let me know about your power source, and thoughts on setting several of these up as isolated as possible..
Cheers,
Marius
Hi Marius,
Good questions. I'll try to tackle them. They might be all over the place and without a clear defined structure. Hopefully it provides some context. Your main response is at the end.
I think the first thing to know is exactly what is on your circuit. On the particular one for my desktop with the Bryston and Amphion, I only have 2 switching power supplies. One of them is a Sony dock in another room. I haven't had any problems with that. The other switching power I had until now was a router in a closed network. I disabled it's SSID broadcast and so the BDP-1 is not connected to the internet, but only the router which in turn is connected to the ethernet port of my iMac. So I get the internet for my iMac via it's Wifi and use the ethernet for BDP-1.
I used to use a Powerline adapter on the circuit in the past as the router is too far away to run an ethernet cable, which would have been preferable. Powerline adapter is bad in so many ways. If you put your ears close to them, you can actually hear a high pitch whine. Furthermore, they would make some of my headphones buzz. My BDP/DAC/AMP/speaker combo is all balanced and I couldn't hear any problem directly like with headphones, but could tell the dynamics and blackground were comprimised. So Powerline is gone.
I'm looking into some other bridge devices if I need the internet aspect or being able to control the BDP-1 from a tablet again. You need two cards for two network connectivity at the same time. Only the iMac does this for me. I also have to look into if/how much and what kind of crap they are going to put into the mains.
Another thing about Powerline is that it can creep in other circuits. All of those dimmable LED lights should also be avoided. I've played around with different bulbs from different brands. Some high end ones with high CRI and can tell you that not all dimmers and bulbs are made equal. Some can be very noisy when attenuated. However, it's best to avoid them throughout the house. Both the bulbs and powerline put out a lot of RF! I have tested this with headphones connected to a Macbook Pro which was running on battery with power adapter unplugged, so the power couldn't have been a problem. They
Our rigs should are good enough that you won't notice any concrete evidence of problems. It's more of a subtle change in sound that can be fatiguing over time. There's surprisingly a lot more discussion about power, media storage, and format testing on Naim forums. You might want to also look into that.
Solutions:Isolation Transformer: I'm looking into this more and more for the system. I'll probably be fine with BIT15. I'm already good on the outlets as I upgraded them to some nice Hubbell a few months back. That was a good upgrade.
Switching power supplies: Not all of them are bad and certainly not to the same extent. In general, I try to remove as many as possible, especially on the circuit.
Ethernet: Like USB, ethernet can also be noisy. There are fiber converters where you need to buy a pair of two of them and the incoming ethernet is converted to light and back out to ethernet in second box. Again, good option. Except both of those devices also run on SMPS. So either you then have to worry about how noisy those boxes are vs. the benefit of their conversion. Or get a linear power supply for them as well. It's part of the reason why I didn't get an Uptone Regen and went with the passive Jitterbug as I didn't want to deal with another SMPS and having to replace that with a LPS as well. My goal is to keep the number of devices to a minimum.
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Before discussing the power supplies of hard drives, let's just talk about them in practical use. The bigger external hard drives are cheaper by a little bit and can offer bigger max sizes in general and for the money in comparison to the portable hard drives. However, I have yet to find a single external hard drive that was anywhere as quiet sounding as the 5400 portable WD Drives. You cannot hear them even when music is not playing. They are sitting behind the rack along with the hub. So for that reason, I only stick with portable drives....HOWEVER, the external drive runs on 12V. I'll get back to that.
The BDP-1 has its own LPS, so need to worry about that. If you have a BDA-X, then you're good. I use an external Teradak for my DAC, so I'm also covered in that areas:
http://www.teradak.com/products/66.htmlMy amp is a Class D, but it's the cleanest implementation of SMPS I've seen. It's better than some top Class A/AB I've heard in being linear and neutral. Plus, I can leave it on 24/7. So I'm not concerned about any of the major hardware in my rig in terms of power or pollution.
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Now back to the remaining two SMPS: router for me and portable hard drives and hubs (for both of us).
I checked my SMPS and found that the router and the big WD external hard drive use 12V. The USB hub on the other hand uses 5V. The portable hard drive on the other hand needs a USB input. Here's where you can do a 2-1.
I can get either one 12V LPS that gives 2 root lines: 1 for the router and one for the external big drive. For USB hub, I'll need a separate LPS as its 5V. However, most modems/routers nowadays have USB slots so you can plug the portable hard drive directly to the router which is powered by the LPS. That way you only need one LPS with one output
If you do it this way with the portable drive on the router, then you'll be sending music via ethernet. So you cannot add Jitterbugs to that. However, if needed, one could add the fiber converter I previously mentioned that are also being powered with LPS.
OR, if routers/switches are not needed at all and you're just big external drives or small drives with a LPS, then you get either get a 12V for the big drives or a 5v for the hub. There's many ways a system can be hooked up.
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Here's another crucial thing I've noticed that I have not seen mentioned yet at all. if you connect say a flash drive and a portable drive directly to the BDP-1 and also an external drive all at the same time, and load the same WAV file on each of them, and then that file from each device, it will sound different! (Which we know)
However, the mere act of plugging in the devices to the BDP-1 doesn't affect them badly. I think the problem arises it's when drawing the stream from each source that the noise type of each source becomes relevant. There doesn't seem to be an adverse affect from having other noisy drives plugged in as long as they are not being used for the music. So that's a positive for Bryston!
You will notice that the BDP-1 is constantly buffering. Unlike with some computers and softwares like Audirvana, you can actually load the entire album and unplug the drive and the entire album will play out. This is the best way to stop worrying about noise from source.
If you've read the forums on memory playback, then you've heard about this: "Our software plays from the memory and not the drive itself so the noise doesn't matter."
To me that's true, but doesn't fully solve the problem. Even then the actual music is being played from memory which it keeps buffering in advance, HOWEVER, the buffer is being updated continuously so the MEDIA STORAGE is ALWAYS in play in the circuit.
I even mentioned this for the BDP-3 as a feature. I want true buffering of all tracks in advance. I don't mind the wait of a few seconds or even the first minute. I want to be able to load all the tracks in the memory and then either put my drive to sleep or even be able to plug the hard drive from the USB port and let it finish the album.
However, there's no need to unplug or put the drives to sleep as there doesn't seem to be an adverse affect of just having the drives plugged in.
I haven't seen any BDP-3 impressions yet, but I'm interested in hearing about what the 8GB of RAM can do for the sound and if it can take the drives out of the scenario after a few seconds.
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I'll link some LPS in the future for the hard drives/switches/routers/hubs etc.
I might have missed a few things here and there. It's all over the place with lots of variables that one can choose to control or not if they wish.
