Teddy pardo power supply for the ultra

[Musician]

Agreed I have a musical fidelity V- Dac 2 that came with a nice wall wart linear power supply. But they made a power supply that was so pretty. It looked exactly like the dac for the same money as the dac. And it made no change whatsoever. That’s when I learned my lesson that changing something out is not always better. Did it look cool having the same two beautiful aluminum boxes on my Audio rack yeah. Was it worth 400 bucks no! Also, I trust the WiiM team to design a switch mode power supply that would work very well with the Ultra. Why would they give you a crappy power supply? With their responses and knowledge and customer service that I see on here I would not doubt their ability to do anything, especially when it comes to a power supply, they know what they’re doing.

Yes, there are NO guaranties to get better sound. The proof If its better sounding or not is in the measurements and also the listening tests.

The Ultra has different regulators on the PCB after the 12V power supply - they are all probably optimised for using the inbuilt switch mode power supply, i.e. made for supressing higher frequencies. There are probably SMPS regulators feeding the DAC chip.

I guess most people dont even know what a regulator is .

This component makes the power supply regulated and will alone supress noise and ripple 60-90 dB . Very different regulators are needed depending on the power supply used. A SMPS needs a regulator that supresses higher frequencies, like a LM2596S. A linear power supply needs a regulator that supresses lower frequencies, like a tl1084 or lm317.

Rob Watts from Chord calls linear power supplies a ”religion” , and postulate that most SMPS sounds better.
RFi seems to be an evil thing though.

 

[Musician]

I did a lot of experiments with LPS and WiiM pro :

Test WIIM pro+ with different power supplies

Hifi should really be about what sounds nice to the system's owner. I have everything from old 70s amps to my wiim amp, I'm sure most of them measure terribly compared to $40,000 hifi stuff shown at the trade shows, however I like how they sound and isn't that what it's all about? Yeah. I’m...

forum.wiimhome.com

I have also compared the electrical digital spdif output from the Ultra to an external dac , with the spdif out from the WiiM pro, and even when using a linear power supply with the pro , the stock Ultra with its smps sound a tiny bit better.

Onlyoneme has shown that the Ultras eye pattern of the spdif output is better than the pro:s.

 

[canard]

It is also one of the main sources of breakdowns, of planned obsolescence in consumer equipment... often fragile, would require more costs to make them reliable but which would then be contradictory with their choice...etc.

 

[Musician]

It is also one of the main sources of breakdowns, of planned obsolescence in consumer equipment... often fragile, would require more costs to make them reliable but which would then be contradictory with their choice...etc.

This might be a concern - youre right about this.

 

[gordik]

The Ultra seems pretty hard to disamble, and theres probably some desoldering to do and some time to find the ” stealing ” point for the DC .

How many amateurs can desolder smd components , especially on a 4 layer card ?

it's very easy, 4 screws under the rubber feet, the prise the bottom off, solder +ve wire from the linear supply to the +ve 12 V pin of the ac/dc convertor and -ve wire to the -ve 12 V pin (make sure mains lead to the Ultra is disconnected). Sounds a bit smoother. Solder a connector and you can go back to using the mains lead/switching supply if you want to compare switching vs linear etc.

if you want to go further you can disconnect the other board from the main board if you're not using those inputs/outputs and it still streams via ethernet and outputs via the internal dac and it means any noise introduced by the second board is gone.

 

[gordik]

it's very easy, 4 screws under the rubber feet, the prise the bottom off, solder +ve wire from the linear supply to the +ve 12 V pin of the ac/dc convertor and -ve wire to the -ve 12 V pin (make sure mains lead to the Ultra is disconnected). Sounds a bit smoother. Solder a connector and you can go back to using the mains lead/switching supply if you want to compare switching vs linear etc.

if you want to go further you can disconnect the other board from the main board if you're not using those inputs/outputs and it still streams via ethernet and outputs via the internal dac and it means any noise introduced by the second board is gone.

important - need to remove the ac/dc convertor first, so can't do old/new testing. Still relative easy to do, just unscrewing board and disconnecting the connectors.
seems to operate at below 12 V with the one board, am using a bench supply and wiim was working at 5V