To Battery Or Not To Battery (12 Volt)

As a woodworker I could dress that up in a vented cherry wood box, but the off-gassing of the batteries inside a home might be a problem. Of course, one could place the whole assembly outside and wire it into the house. Then the problem becomes very cold weather and that effect on the batteries. Probably battery heaters would be required.

Back in the day I had N.E.W. (Nirvana Electronic Werkes) class a SS amp that ran off 4 wheelchair 12V batteries. My Merlin VSM BAM runs off four 9V batteries. I've tried various battery packs/inverters to run some source equipment. There is a certain level of the black background/noise floors thing even conditioned AC can't compete with.

I do location recording of orchestras, bands, choirs, etc. and don’t want to be running long cables across the floor of a church or auditorium.  Trip hazard!!  So a Tascam SD-20M was a solution.  Much better than those hand-held portable recorders. It was designed to use a 12 VDC wall wart, but what was amazing is when I substituted a 12 VDC battery pack made up from 8 D cell batteries.  Not only could I dispense with the long AC extension cord, but the increase in sound quality in my recordings was remarkable.  Lower noise floor (I always recorded at 24/88.2) and much smoother tone from massed strings and voices.  And I could park the recorder right under my Blumlein microphone set up!   The only disadvantage was that the recorder drew about 350mA so the battery pack was good for only about 3-4 hours using 48 V phantom power for the mikes. Enough for anything but Wagnerian operas 😆.

I run a domestic 240-Volt audio-visual system off-grid in my motorhome, from 12 Volt battery power.

Two 100 Amp-hour lithium batteries are recharged from solar, the alternator or mains, if connected.  I use a 2000-Watt pure sinewave inverter and power a Marantz AV receiver, Sony universal disc transport and KEF powered subwoofer.

Some basic physics implies that very heavy currents are drawn when the inverter is running close to full power.  A couple of hundred amps is normal.

All lithium batteries must include internal overload protection, and often these circuits have very limited current capacity.  In this application, the most important specification is the maximum current that can be supplied by each battery through its protection circuitry.

The energy stored in each battery is quite small, about 1 kilo-Watt Hour - enough to run a hair drier for half an hour.

There is some irony that a very pure power supply has to be converted to AC and then back to DC in each audio component.