Using battery power to go off the City's power grid

Great post, @ricevs - many great points there, and you reminded me of a few more things I've been wanting to try.

Regarding what you called a "zippy" sound:

I'll add to that a pronounced sound of "air" and other micro details.  It is impressive, and even seductive, that a system can reproduce and present that "plankton" (for lack of a better word) in a recording - and good systems can do this without it sounding harsh or fatiguing.  It's very cool, and my system has done that.  But in my opinion, it is not natural if you compare to hearing a live performance. 

On my own journey, with each successful change to lower noise in my system - that "zip" and air and pronounced plankton is not as noticeable.  It's there, but not a main player anymore - just supporting the artists and instruments.  

My experience has been that lowering/removing noise has increased realism which creates more frequent emotional responses to the music - for me.  Natural, organic realism is what I respond to most.  And being able to have that emotional response on demand is my goal.  

Happy listening to all.

ricevs,

I agree with much of what you just said.  My main question was about the bass from the Goal Zero.  Comparing to wall AC, Is it looser and fuller, in other words quantitatively greater but qualitatively worse as with old school tube amps?  Is it tighter but quantitatively less?  I assume you found that aside from the bass, the Goal Zero is more accurate in midrange/HF?

Still, noise reduction easily occurs when you roll off HF.  With crude Dolby noise reduction, I remember HF hiss was nearly eliminated this way, but information in the rest of the range was severely destroyed, creating lifeless sound.  The sonic effect is its own type of distortion.  So noise is not synonymous with distortion.  

We want LIFE to all the instruments.  For wind instruments, you want to hear the nice tone, but also the mechanical sounds such as keys, valves, spitting.  Some people seek to get rid of these extraneous "noisy" sounds, but all these sounds are part of the complete sound of the instrument and must be revealed although not exaggerated.

+1@ricevs I've been working at noise reduction for years what with all my battery experiments, dedicated ac lines, conditioning, and now with streaming.

Noise reduction in streaming is so linear to ac cleanup in general sense. You are describing the exact qualities I hear with my present setup. My streaming and cd rips no longer sound like digital, simply sounds like performers in room, and better than my vinyl setup due to higher resolution/transparency.

If battery power could outperform my rather intensive ac cleansing this would be comparable or superior to major component upgrade. At this point trying to decide if my next move will be another network filtering device or battery power.

Viber,

The bass using the Goal Zero Yeti 400 is looser but not fuller...there is the same exact amount of bass as with the wall. It has relatively high output impedance compared to big inverters so makes sense that bass would be affected negativiely (sounds slower). You seem to have one opinion of everything....."something is either detailed, tight and accurate or its loose bloated and slow". This is far, far from the truth of things. There are a million shades of grey and many sonic factors are independent of each other. You can have loose bass that is less, the same or more than tight bass.....tight bass can be small, medium or large and full....yes, listen to some bass playing live......depending on the room, instrument, whether it is amplified or not....bass can have infintie descriptions. IT IS NOT ONE WAY......expand your mind.......it it infinite.....However, we ARE ONE......but many are the ways and names.

Actually, live unamplified bass in the appropriately sized room or hall is delightful because of the many harmonic overtones which go up to HF.  Take a French horn which has bass, although not as deep as a tuba.  James Boyk has an essay called "Life above 20 kHz" or something like that.  He showed that the French horn has significant energy up to 9 kHz.  When you hear the French horn up close, it has tightness of bass, as well as midrange/HF.  Bass by itself isn't tight, but the perceived tightness is from the much higher freq overtones integrated into the total sound of the instrument.  

Bass instruments in various sized rooms have different tonal balances.  The large piano in a small room sounds awful, because the walls reinforce the bass more than higher freq, creating a bass dominant heavy sound.  The same piano on a large concert stage sounds lighter in tonal balance, with less perceived bass than in the small room.

The Goal Zero 400 is a special case where the high impedance is another factor to its detriment of bass.  Perhaps larger inverters with lower output impedance is a big factor in explaining their superior sound.  But impedance is only one factor.  We can look up the impedance of the larger Yeti 3000, and compare to Giandel 2200 and 5000.  There are probably other factors responsible for the superior sound of the Giandels, and whether the G 5000 is superior to the G 2200.  Any of these units are a tiny fraction of the Stromtanks, so that's why I am going for the G 5000 which your friend vouches for.