After reading here about the sonic improvements of using a lithium ion power station to power your system I decided to give it a try. I bought a Jackery 290 one of their smallest units.
My system's front stage (TT, phono pre, preamp) is plugged into an ExactPower power regenerator plugged into the wall. Power amp is directly plugged into the wall. My initial plan was to only power the turntable and phono pre with the battery thinking the tube preamp would suck too much juice. A cool feature most of these lithium batteries have is a display showing your wattage draw from plugged in devices. My turntable running and phono pre were only drawing about 18-23 watts. With the tube preamp plugged in it was drawing around 50-55 watts. The battery is rated at 290 watt hours so that would give roughly 5+ hours of listening time (290 ÷ 55). Perfect as this is roughly how long my listening sessions are.
I fired up the system. Here's the condensed review: I'm never going back to ac line power again lol.
Here's the long review: I thought I had a pretty good black background before. WRONG! I hate to come off as shill sounding but this was a night and day difference. That whole lifting the veil thing I see here frequently happened. It wasn't subtle. Everything was more defined and just natural sounding. I am made aware of this every time I run the system and plug the regenerator back into the wall (which is a synergistic research Teslaplex) to warm everything up without draining the battery. I wait in anticipation to get it plugged into the battery.
Ok enough shilling here are the cons and what has kept many from taking the plunge themselves. Fan noise. It's not quiet. The fan didn't need to run with only the turntable and phono pre plugged in but it sure did with the tube preamp also plugged in. I listen at high volume though so it's not audible. Any low level listening would be impossible if you have the unit in the same room as you. There are ways around this that I'm considering. Even at full 55 watt draw over a few hours it's still blowing cool air from the fan. I see others have disconnected the fan at your own risk of course. Or I may just put a cardboard box over it with a notch cut out for the power cable. Longevity is another issue. These batteries have a finite life cycle of between 500-3000 charges depending on brand and model. This means whatever you spend on it you will be spending again or more down the road to replace it. However despite all of this I'm not going back. The sound is that good!
Overview: Lithium ion battery power is a game changer if your setup and listening habits support it. If you listen at low levels and aren't willing to do something about the fan it won't work. If your system plays daily and for long hours you may be going through batteries pretty fast. I usually only get quality listening time on the weekends so not an issue for me really.
The end result is the sound is too good to me to go back despite the cons listed.
