JCAT - Perhaps, snakeoil?

[Logistics]

So, I joined this PC Audio group on facebook, but it already seems that the guy running it is one of those guys who gives high regards to all this high-dollar equipment, which is probably so he gets kick backs or samples, like those guys on 6moons do.

Anyway, the latest post is a LINEAR PC power supply by a company called JCAT. Naturally, they suggest that switching supplies are terribly noisy in comparison. I understand that switching supplies allegedly, have higher tendency to introduce noise into your PC's electricals (and obviously, we have examples of terrible supplies on this forum), which may affect your audio output at your sound card. BUUUT I've already tinkered enough to know that I can get very black backgrounds in my audio, and amazing imaging, simply by replacing capacitors, often with films in the line-level signal stages. Of course, the last time I did this, I recapped the PSU, motherboard and soundcard.

In any case, what do you guys think of this? I haven't used any of their stuff, but it looks to me like the MonsterCable of the PC world.

-Matthew

[kaboom]

Re: JCAT - Perhaps, snakeoil?

So, I joined this PC Audio group on facebook, but it already seems that the guy running it is one of those guys who gives high regards to all this high-dollar equipment,


In any case, what do you guys think of this? I haven't used any of their stuff, but it looks to me like the MonsterCable of the PC world.

-Matthew

Never heard of them, so either it's "featured" stuff like those youtube videos of cheep PWM ("class D") amps, complete with fake caps, ignorance and reposting hearsay/planted/trending "noise," or any variation thereof.

FWIW, I've reworked the gain staging on an old ISA ES1868 card, which now passes for hifi with its excellent SNR. The PCM DAC is slightly "whiny" with certain sample rates, but it's because they didn't bring that circuit out to its own filtering node when that chip was designed.

Most of those cards ran the final opamp at extreme gain, usually with "cheaper" parts. So you'd have to keep the mixer output of the 1868 waaay down to avoid overloading the opamp; this gave many older soundcards an unfair reputation of being excessively noisy. Look over at vogons for example.

With my mods (plus adding&recapping), I can now run the mixer at full output and the opamp now simply brings that to line level. The SNR is much improved- more than once I've done the "is this thing on" thing...

As for supply rejection, practically all onboard audio systems and many sound cards have their own local regulators, most often 7800/7900 series. Any final opamps that don't have their own regulators have, even with cheaper parts, more than enough supply voltage rejection.

The NJR/NJM 4580 is one of my favorites, but there are other good ones.

Wanna bet initial shipments of that jcat, spurred from the initial failbook trolling, will be better made than ones six months from now?

If there's an electrically noisy video card, with bad caps, right above a soundcard, no power supply in the world will quiet things down.

Oh, look at my sig- high price doesn't always mean high quality!

BUUUT I've already tinkered enough to know that I can get very black backgrounds in my audio, and amazing imaging, simply by replacing capacitors, often with films in the line-level signal stages. Of course, the last time I did this, I recapped the PSU, motherboard and soundcard.

We all remember those socket 7 systems, and 3/486s if old enough, where you'd hear the mouse pointer buzzing in the speakers or headphones. Some of those old motherboards just had small tantalum caps or other minimal filtering- basically enough to satisfy the noise margins of the digital stuff. Analog stuff was an afterthought and handled per-board (video card for example) or poorly (cheap & not-so-cheap sound cards). Motherboards didn't seem to get good bulk filtering til the late Pentium 2 days. And soundcards always seemed to do better with more/added caps. The older ones could sometimes have the analog and digital supplies separated and decoupled individually.

[stj]

Re: JCAT - Perhaps, snakeoil?

what's the point, there is a huge 70w+ switching psu on your motherboard!