I recently added an ENO Ag (fed by Monoprice CAT8) in front of my Roon Nucleus, that was already being powered by an HDPlex 300 LPS, which was also feeding 5v power to my Schiit Yggdrasil DAC with Unison USB, via a USB Disruptor. It made a clear improvement.
So did replacing my 2013 MacBook Pro running Roon with the Nucleus, adding the LPS to the Nucleus, and adding the 5v LPS to the USB Disruptor (in decreasing order of effect size). In all cases, the effect was a lowering of a noise floor that I thought was already non-existent, or at least below what I could hear before the change was made. Low level information that was previously not there, became easily apparent. The decay of a note, the decay of a room, the shuffle of a foot on the floor, the squeak of a chair. Details and more details. And guess what? More of these details all add up to realism, and that's what I am aiming for. I want a time machine that takes me back to the instant of the musicians playing the take on the recording.
So, to me, with no need to do double-blind testing, the effects are real. Heck, even if they are pure placebo, I don't care, as long as I hear them. And I do. So that begs the next question, why did those changes make that improvement? Some might want to know because they want to understand the world. I just want to know "why", so I can make more such improvements, to make my time machine better.
So "improvements" might have to do with lowering some property of the electrical noise floor. I don't know. Show me some data. But I do know they make the music better. The why is a mystery at this point. One thing that I do wonder about: in every waveform analysis that I have seen (have not seen that many though), the digital 1's and 0's are far from perfect. Overshooting, ringing, not perfectly vertical or horizontal waveforms. So they are really an analog representation of a digital signal. I know they work fine to deliver this overly long post full of conjecture, but I am more uncertain of the effect of non-perfect digital 1's and 0's on the reproduction of the very fine details of music.
Enjoy the music!!
-docknow
So did replacing my 2013 MacBook Pro running Roon with the Nucleus, adding the LPS to the Nucleus, and adding the 5v LPS to the USB Disruptor (in decreasing order of effect size). In all cases, the effect was a lowering of a noise floor that I thought was already non-existent, or at least below what I could hear before the change was made. Low level information that was previously not there, became easily apparent. The decay of a note, the decay of a room, the shuffle of a foot on the floor, the squeak of a chair. Details and more details. And guess what? More of these details all add up to realism, and that's what I am aiming for. I want a time machine that takes me back to the instant of the musicians playing the take on the recording.
So, to me, with no need to do double-blind testing, the effects are real. Heck, even if they are pure placebo, I don't care, as long as I hear them. And I do. So that begs the next question, why did those changes make that improvement? Some might want to know because they want to understand the world. I just want to know "why", so I can make more such improvements, to make my time machine better.
So "improvements" might have to do with lowering some property of the electrical noise floor. I don't know. Show me some data. But I do know they make the music better. The why is a mystery at this point. One thing that I do wonder about: in every waveform analysis that I have seen (have not seen that many though), the digital 1's and 0's are far from perfect. Overshooting, ringing, not perfectly vertical or horizontal waveforms. So they are really an analog representation of a digital signal. I know they work fine to deliver this overly long post full of conjecture, but I am more uncertain of the effect of non-perfect digital 1's and 0's on the reproduction of the very fine details of music.
Enjoy the music!!
-docknow