Took the lithium ion battery plunge
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.
Not everyone uses inverters, @carlsbad , @sns . I choose @rbertalotto 's solution for phono / pre. No inverter, no bridge rectifier, no filter caps, no filter chokes. It's bad enough for amps, where LC-LC-LC-C is good enough for me - that's a Farad of capacitance and hundreds of pounds of chokes. DIY forever! |
@antialiased I understand that. But that's not what the people buying the new battery system are doing. @blue_collar_audio_guy Your exact power is not a regenerator. It is a "filter" and I hate to say it, may be doing more harm than good for your amp. Try this once: Plug your amp dirctly into the battery system and the rest of the equipment into the EPS plugged into the wall. Your amp may sound even better. Jerry |
since recently learning of battery and super capacitor power supply i have been wondering how it is connected to devices expecting 60Hz 120V . so from these posts i learned of inverters . would it not make more sense to open up the devices and bypass the AC stuff and connect the DC power directly so skip any inverter circuitry |
Interesting thread. I recently purchased a Battery powered Dodd Audio preamp from a friend. Its addition to my system is a revelation. Getting Audiophiles off the grid might get them some sleep at night, since most of the guys I know listen from around 10 to 2 o’clock in the morning, to avoid dirty power. |
@bernadie5317 indeed that would be theoretically nice. However many amps use several different voltages out of their transformers and tube amps generally are going to requre ac to drive a transformer to make the b+ voltages and other things. For a DAc or other component operating on a single DC voltage you might get great result. Batteries won't hold a constant voltage over a long listening period unless they are very oversized. So that may be an issue. I've never heard personally of anyone doing this but I bet it's been done. |
