I am considering making the following upgrades for my system.
Now my question is whether changing the in wall cable has any effect if I would later also add a balanced power supply? Do these balanced p.s. devices alter the incoming power to a degree where it doesn’t matter what cable is before it?
Where would you place your BPS? In the music room or with the main electrical consumer unit? Our Airlink BPS is on a dedicated radial supply by the MCB.
Best regards, BF
One that I can plug into the wall near the audio. Inside a cabinet.
So the audio group socket would be used to connect the BPS.
Understood. In that case, the following may help.
Naim power supplies benefit from the minimum possible input impedance, so a dedicated supply with high current cables (eg cooker cabling) can certainly help.
Make sure that your BPS doesn’t hum. Ours doesn’t but you wouldn’t want to replace Naim transformer hum with BPS hum.
Be very careful to isolate everything that’s powered via your BPS from anything else. This is for safety reasons. If in doubt, ask a qualified electrician before connecting ANYTHING up.
Best regards, BF
To answer your question as simply as possible, changing to a dedicated Gigawatt LC-Y if you are going to connect a BPS to the audio group will make no difference at all.
The most important thing to understand when using a BPS is to make shure that the mains voltage matches as close as possible the input voltage on the BPS. The best way to do this is to use a voltage Logger for a week or so on your audio group (these can be hired).
Before i actually bought my BPS i had a Logger set up for month and my average voltage was 232v, so i bought a 230v BPS. If though you discover that your average voltage is 240v a BPS3000 would be the wrong choice for you. A better choice would be the BPS3000UKMP because you have the option of setting 230v/240v/250v as your input voltage.
Having the correct input voltage set on any BPS will give you the best supply for your setup. It will also kill stone dead any chance of hum from the BPS and also any hum from the power supply sections of your audio equipment.
Using a balanced power supply in a domestic UK setting is potentially dangerous, even lethal.
This is taken directly from Airlink’s safety of conditioned balanced power supplies,
" 1. For an electric shock risk the following two faults would have to occur at the same time: (i) a short circuit occurring between either the mains live or the mains neutral to the case or earthed points of the equipment (a catastrophic event) and (ii) the earth connection would need to be disconnected
2. with the equipment mains fuse blown and a short circuit occurring between the equipment live earth (a catastrophic event), current could still flow inside the faulty equipment
In other words there would need to be a catastrophic failure of the audio/visual equipment for either scenario to occur."
Further, all the BPS’s sold in the UK have an inbuilt circuit breaker. Should an earth fault be detected the BPS would switch off anyway.
Thanks!
So I can also assume that the power cord to connect the BPS to the wall won’t make any difference to the quality of the output?
None what so ever (the one that comes with the Airlink is good quality anyway). The important things are the BPS itself and the quality of the power leads from the BPS to your various bits of equipment.
Power cable still matters with bps, though lower priced ones tend to show themselves better. As for Naim in particular, I would recommend not to use it for the boxes but another stuff (network, home appliances etc.)
Not connect the Naim boxes? The reason to buy it would be to connect the Naim boxes and my active Atc’s. Why wouldn’t I connect the Naim boxes to the BPS?
In my experience it destroys “Naim sound” a bit, high quality mains block works better (maybe because of the impedance increase of the line). To receive benefits from balanced transformers there’s no always a need to connect hi-fi boxes to them, it can be literally any stuff in the mains (mine takes tv, playstation and routers for example).
The whole idea of using a BPS with audio equipment is to completely isolate said equipment from everything else connected to the mains. Using a mains block, hi quality or not, does not isolate anything. Neither do mains conditioners for that matter.
And no, they do not destroy “Naim sound” What they do give you is the best clean mains supply for your audio equipment. What you hear with one connected is exactly what you were always supposed to hear.
I would much rather believe the 10’s of 1000’s of recording studio’s worldwide and the same amount of tv studio’s worldwide that have been using BPS’s since the 1950’s, than a random poster on an internet forum.
Well, it depends on the gear, I’ve been using bps for quite some time now, it’s a great tool in general but might be not as straightforward as you think.
What do you use then?
Mudra Akustik pms now
That is not a BPS, it’s a power block.
It’s a line of products which includes bps also
OK, so what modules do you have and how are they configured?
Balanced transformer and mains block, main purpose in my system is to isolate ‘dirty’ side of ethernet network (provider’s router and 1st audio router). But it’s not the only one I’ve tried and not only with Naim.