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.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.
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.
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