More small sound upgrades

One more interesting upgrade I've done for now: Adding an Elna 470µF cap in parallel with the 47µF Panasonic FM and the 0.1µF Wima to the decoupling stage on my NeoMini USB DAC

After "upgrading" the power by using the power adaptor and cutting the supply from the computer, I had a hunch that the power adaptor, with lousy max power capacity and voltage regulation, is going to provide insufficient power at times (power dips), which may explain the small bit of loss in bass power when I removed the com power supply.

So I decided to add a reservoir capacitor. Digging around, I found a 470µF Elna, courtesy of alvin1118. This kind of capacitors (brand + size + type + packaging) are supposed to be good for audio power, although using something that costs more than $0.25 on such a mini DAC (pun intended) is a definite overkill. But hey, I love overkills, at least I don't even have to think that I'm sacrificing something else for an improvement.

470µF seems like an overkill for a decoupling capacitor for such application anyway. Or so common sense would tell us. Will it yield little improvement as expected or does my current setup superceds common sense? Lets find out.

Lesson on electronics for the newcomers: Decoupling
Decoupling, bypassing, power reservoir, power filtering, they are all the same; it's just a capacitor connected in parallel to the load i.e. connected to the V+ and ground or V-. But other decoupling and bypassing which have slightly different use and approach, power reservoir (or reservoir caps) and power filtering seem to suggest some extreme situations - power reservoir suggests a huge capacitance to compensate for a very bad power supply which cannot handle the loads, while power filtering suggests a more sophisticated approach (or plain marketing badass). After you read on how it works, you'll realize they're all the same.

Basically, your DC power source will never be perfect; there will be EMI noise, ripple, and voltage dips, which are the same ol' fluctuations in voltage but in increasing magnitude and decreasing frequency. If we want a cleaner (more stable) power, we add capacitors in parallel. The capacitors act as a backup storage, or think of it as a alternate (or engineers like to call it, local, because of their proximity to the load) source of power. The good part is, capacitors provide very clean power and releases them very quickly, at least compared to a battery (which is by some definition a capacitor also, lolololol). And in audio it's already known that battery > adaptor, and capacitor > battery, so it's sure to be good. (BTW decoupling caps are also used in battery-powered amps.

Now the bad part, capacitors store very little power for their size, and the faster/cleaner power you want (which is dependant on capacitor type), the less capacity you get. You starting to see the trend among all the power sources?

And so, how decoupling capacitor works in layman terms - when the voltage is at e.g. 5V, the capacitor charges up to 5V and stays there. When there is a voltage dip at the power source to e.g. 4.5V, the capacitor, being at a higher voltage, will allow the current to flow out of itself, hence providing the 5V for a short while. Hopefully, after that the voltage dip is gone, and the capacitor charges back up again. It works the same way but opposite for voltage spikes; capacitor absorbs the extra voltage/current. And so what you get is a cleaner and more stable power.

Ok, a .5V dip isn't really what capacitors are supposed to handle - what they handle is in the 0.001 to 0.010V range. But from what I observed, poorly-regulated switching power supplies (meaning almost all your power adaptors and many computer PSUs) can allow for voltage drops in excess of 0.1V. While this isn't a problem for computing since they allow for a 5% variation from the rated voltage, in audio this translated into a very nasty 0.25V. And many cheaper power adaptors (AND MAINBOARD USB POWER!!! <---- read) don't even meet this standard (which is why your 2.5" USB HDD fails to spin). So isn't that worrying?

So while in normal audio cases for power filtering a 0.1µF and a 47µF capacitors are used (to deal with different frequencies of noise - remember that smaller capacitance = faster?), in my case I need a power reservoir to handle variations of ~0.1V. 470µF sounds just about right for this.

Now now, in many cases 470µF isn't used, coz:

1. It's usually physically too big
Yes, indeed I had to lay it down (put it horizontal instead of standing upright), and on the underside of the PCB in order to make it barely fit in my case.
2. It's usually too slow due to the capacity
Using an Elna should give me some room. Plus larger voltage dips due to poor voltage regulation/power capacity are usually of very low frequency.
3. You won't usually see situations that require that big of a capacitance
Now you do. In fact, for lower-end devices using poor power sources, many DIY people have used 220 to 470µF caps for decoupling.
I actualy wanted to put a 3300µF cap considering the voltage regulation of my power source (which is shiet) but it wouldn't fit in my case.

Enough of the stuff-most-people-won't-even-bother-to-care part above which I considerately reduced the font size. All we care is about the outcome, right?

So here it is - drastic improvement to the highs; they sound freaking clear, lots of high harsh is gone and the sound follows through well, not to be confused with reverb but after the notes hit the volume does not decrease too quickly. Very good for high-pitched percussion/hit type instruments. Same improvement to a smaller extent can be seen in bass too. Overall the sound is much more natural with a slight increase in soundstage.

However, there seem to be a slight loss in dynamics. At first I didn't understand why that happens since I was expecting that a more stable power will give better dynamics thinking that huge dynamics cause voltage dips which is countered using capacitors. Turns out the dynamics were still there when I played back at the same volume with the SRS WOW effect turned off; in fact there was more indeed. But the decreased noise and more detail and soundstage and music lingering in the air means even more things were amplified with the WOW (surround sound) effect, so the dynamics kinda got covered up. And also, since the harshness of the high instruments and boomy bass were gone these notes also made less of a presence.

But because of this, on the whole it sounds very natural. Very uncolored sound.

Interesting how cleaner power actually led to this neutrality and loss in dynamics. Is it that the better your system, the more natural it sounds?

And interesting how a $1 capacitor can improve the sound so drastically. Heck expensive interconnects which all they do is color the sound.

And interesting how sucky your computer power supply (and cheapo power adaptor) is in order to make this work.

Canare 4S6 (17AWG equivalent)(Star Quad - 2 smaller conducters for one wire) against Belden 1307A (16AWG)

At first I only needed some extra cables for some wiring and soldering job. Then I thought, why not get some Canare 4S6 to fight against the Belden 1307A that I'm using now?

And so a trip to LHS. Wierd, I asked for the smallest Star Quad they had, they say Star Quads are not for speakers; speaker cables are never meant to be twisted (HUH?). So I asked for the 16-17AWG Canare speaker cable, and they gave me the 4S6. Isn't this like the Star Quad I'm looking for? And after stripping it up at home, it is definitely twisted. So what was the uncle talking about?

Preparing the 4S6 was a nightmare - you have twice the number of conductors to strip, and the paper and cotton fly everywhere and onto the bare cables themselves. Not very nice. Getting two wires to clip onto the same hole is the worst, first twist the wires together at a good angle - too little and the wires comes off too easily, too much and it becomes too thick to fit. Plus have to make sure that the wires approach together instead of one front one back, else the 17AWG cable becomes 20AWG. Took much longer to hook up compared to the Beldens. (The Beldens are actually very easy due to the thickness and toughness of the strands)

These cables are definitely meant to be soldered onto connectors.

Initial impression - they are not burnt in, yet they already exhibit a more prominent high (although not as clear... yet). Bass is lacking definitely, slightly less than my Beldens before burning in and a lot less compared to them now.

This is to be expected - Belden has very thick strands, while the Canare has two conductors of very thin strands. Skin effect tells us the Canare will be brighter.

I'd say the two cables are equal with different uses - Canare for clearer trebles, Belden for more (natural) bass power. Also, the Canare feels more pro and might possibly sound that slightly better too, but the Belden won't wear and tear as much from usage. Anyway, there's no way I'm going to use the Canare for wiring projects. Plus, more people in audio seem to be advocating thick solid copper core nowadays, and Belden is closer to that than Canare, so one more win for the thick strands.

I originally wanted to keep using the Canares for speakers and cut some Beldens for a project, but something happened the day after I installed the cables which forced me to use back the Beldens. Read on to my next post...

Believe in the power

Further listening: After some time of listening to more songs, I noticed that there are more pluses to minuses effects. For one, the highs are definitely cleaner. Secondly, the mid-bass where the bass notes are also received a good improvement - they are more clear and don't get disrupted by the other sounds. Also, the sound is more natural on the whole despite being more noisy, plus the fact that lossless files did not exhibit the extra noise can only mean one thing,

Time to leave MP3 and migrate to loseless. If I can find them, that is.

EDIT: While trying to strip the rubber coating and getting past the aluminium shield, I realised that I could achieve the same effect by taping the power pins on the USB connector so as to insulate them. Did that in a minute and saved a cable (although the rubber was cut open and the aluminium slightly damaged).

It sounds differently now, and not all positively, might be placebo I hope. It sounds "less powerful", and more garbled, but that might be because of the song (and the SRS WOW effect). Despite this I seem to be able to hear more instruments, there is definitely less noise, and the highs response improved tremendously. Now all the cymbals/high-hats/ting-dlings are very clear and sustained.

Last week, our hero and friends couldn't wait any longer and just bought a USB hub with a power adaptor for $29 instead of the $24 it would've cost in a bid to solve the hissing problem that he has with his USB DAC. And instead of some cheaper, half-the-price USB hub he decided to go for one with 2A. (Pity the D-Link wasn't easily available; it is price similarly and has 2.5A)

Ok, there wasn't any hero, nor does he have any friends. They are all imaginary if any except for his soul mate/mistress - the computer. And it wasn't last week, but about a month ago.

And yes the hissing was solved for now, it only came back once or twice so far, instead of more than that every day. However, occasionally, I can hear the sound quality degrade, so I still need to plug out and replug the USB cable. But this is less annoying than the hiss and can be left unnoticed.

Thinking about this while replugging the USB cable, I decided to see what would happen if I offed the power adaptor (Sadly, this hub has no control circuitary whatsoever between the two power sources, meaning the light of the adaptor will light up even when the adaptor is not plugged in to the mains but as long as it is connected to the hub which is in turn connected to the computer. This means any noise generated from the computer still gets past, but at least the power strain is lesser. At least I already saw the improvement. But this is still irritating. And what happens if the power backflows to the com? My previous (badly regulated) adaptor already took out a USB port and hung the com/corrupted the HDD/forced 3 days of reformat and troubleshoot/and caused me to lose my just completed music composition. Big impact here, ouch). And so I did, and immediately I could hear a difference. There was a smaller soundstage and the treble was weaker and muffled and bass got a little muddy and weaker. This is on a 128kbps MP3. So I decided to do a side-by-side test with a FLAC. The (above mentioned) difference is audible, not obvious, but audible. And significant, for you may need a DAC one level higher to hear even such a difference.

So power quality (and amount available) really does make a lot of difference in audio.

And hence, my next project - a USB cable with the power wires cut off. I already threw the (failed-?) powered USB cable away unfortunately. This is to completely isolate the USB DAC's power supply from that of the computer. I hope to completely eliminate the noise and get better SQ.

BTW unrelated to this post but still related to audio, last Saturday I decided to connect my father's com to my subwoofer since he was reconnecting it (it is beside my desk and shares the same monitor/keyboard/mouse through KVM), and with My Music folder shared I decided to do an ABX test. The contender's VT1616, which is supposedly a relatively good chip (compared to Realtek, yup. Hey, VIA do make good DSPs, just that their own DACs are a little bit f-ed-up). It practically got owned by the NeoMini. Same things as always: wider soundstage, better instument seperation, tighter bass, cleaner sound. My dad agrees completely. And as expected, the NeoMini has less bass volume (despite being way less boomy) and less warm trebles (although it is less muffled too), because of the lack of a preamp. With a preamp the NeoMini's sound signature will definitely change, although I can't say if it'd be for the better, especially since I'm definitely not encouraging running an op-amp off a computer power supply, and the USB +5V at that.

And with my Belden 16 AWG speaker cables being burnt-in and giving a huge bass-boost, I'm loving my NeoMini USB DAC more and more, and thinking that $55 is definitely worth it. You should hear it practically pwn the on-boards and even SB Audigy; a new Sound Blaster Audigy Value already cost that much, and mine was the almost-full ES version which just didn't have the firewire port.

Clannad Anime (first season) + Movie: Afterthoughts

First thing I want to say is:

THIS SERIES ROX!!!!!!!!!!111111

(I purposely added the 1's to poke at the "common" (?) internet forum/chat problematic behaviour)

Again not a review - there's no need to review something this good. And unlike the previously-mentioned Aria series that has its main audience as primary-school girls, Clannad has its main viewer group as... hardcore Anime hentai freaks and/or geeks. (Or just somebody that just loves good romance/life stories) And hence it gets much higher exposure - schoolgirls don't go onto the internet and broadcast themselves shamelessly, and they don't surf porn. At least I think they don't. That's what she told me. What? Who's she? No, just a no one. I swear. Ironically, Clannad has no porn content like its predecessors and most games in this category, and yet it still sold very high and gets two seasons and a summary movie. No this isn't like the case with Kanon where there were two seperate producers (and the 2002 version didn't get the exposure it deserved); Clannad's second season has its settings after the first, or rather, the first half of the storyline. Yes, the second part (specific character arc) is always better better in both games and the adapted Anime. I might as well mention that in all these games it's usual for the guy to propose his love to the girl first then they have some wierd kind of problem thereafter, and never "happily ever after" then stop. So one could guess that Clannad's first season is only the first half.

So much for the introductory paragraph. It gets longer and makes people boring towards the end. That's newspaper writing. Inverted-pyramid format, less related stuff at the end. I still remember my English, yea?

Now my thoughts... at first I thought that the 3rd major series from key (all small letters yea?) would not be as good as the first two, fueled by the trend that the first will always be the best in many cases except for when the second is even better - this trend can be obvious everywhere. And unfortunately, it usually stops at the second before the creative juice run out. Not my series. That one is at major part 5 and I think it's at its best ever. What's "my series" that I've always been mentioning you say? You won't be knowing it until it is released. Hopefully the first part within the next ten years. And it will be an award-winning seller. I hope.

Digressed for quite a bit. Back to topic, the reason I didn't think anything of Clannad at first was because I saw no serious development for at least the first half of the Anime - first season. Nothing like the sadness in Kanon or AIR. And somebody actually wrote "Clannad - saddest love story" in his signature. That made me puzzled at that point of time. And the ending of the first season left me really unimpressed. So he confessed. That's all. What's so great about that?

Ok, maybe I wasn't all unimpressed. It got heartwarming towards the end (I won't mention spoilers)

After finishing the Anime, I watched the movie immediately, and realize that the story didn't stop there. Some shocking big thing happened. I just had to wiki that out, only to find that the story hasn't ended yet. First I was thinking that it would be better to have watched the Anime first before the movie, since it would have had more detail and impact than watching the half-bucket movie first, as in the case of AIR. Then, I thought that the movie was better because it had more storyline and explained a lot of things. Now I think I'm thoroughly fuked for even watching the movie in the first place, because ALL THE IMPACT IS NOW GONEEEEE!!!!!111 I really should've played the game first, like all the hardcore fans do.

And yes, after all this, I agree that Clannad has its own rights. In fact it is even better than Kanon or AIR in certain aspects. Although it does have that bit of similarity to air. But it took another route and improve on that route. Well, AIR is still the best in its kind. Unfortunately I cannot find another series that can fit under the exact same classification but lets leave it at that.

Can't wait for the second season to come out. Or should I just play the game on PSP?

OMFG Speeds on MOL 2Mbps!!!

Starhub giving free bandwidth???

And this is not a sudden peak, but the speed has sustained over 900KB/s to >1MB/s over a few minutes until my downloads finished one by one. And previously it has been sustaining at over 500KB/s for many minutes.

I've never had such a huge download speed before, not even on 8mbps (when I "only" got 1MB/s. This was over that by a bit) For the first time I see my HDD seeking so much when downloading.

Also, I've first noticed speeds over 500KB/s since last month, so this is not an isolated event. It just needed some good sources to hit this speed.

Remember 11 (Chinese version) available on sale in Popular bookstores!

Yes, it's the third and last part of the Infinity series by KID you've been waiting for. Unless you consider Cure as part of it, but no it didn't really deal with the same philosophy.

For those that have been waiting (and most probably cursing) for the Chinese/English translated version for PC to come out, the reason that it hasn't, or hasn't been able to, is that there wasn't a PC version to start hacking with in the first place. Now that's wierd and you might ask the question: Most visual novels are simple programs programmed on and for PC, so why did they have only the PS2 version (or so I was made known) for this, even though the rest of the series are on PC first? Well, don't ask me. Ask the geniuses that made Ever17 (a.k.a. the only game in which getting ALL the endings makes sense)(to explain, in other games you can only get one ending. In Ever17, the storyline involves going through ALL the endings. Wicked, huh?). Geniuses are usually mad in their own ways.

The PC version was only released Dec 07, and it takes time for it to get translated. Now it's finally out. But, it costs $45, inclusive of a 416pg novel which would comfirm be nice to have but still does not justify the price.

So lets wait for the "Net Communist" version to come out.

Comic Party Portable Gets Chinese Translation!!!

YES, it's finally here, after months of waiting. Finally now Comic Party Portable has been translated to Chinese!

Now we just need to wait for Snow and Clannad and the entire Memories Off series on PSP to get translated. All these games have already made the PSP the best platform for visual novels in Japan. Now lets make it so it Chinese-speaking countries too.

Get it here:
http://g.tgbus.com/Item_422.aspx