Chord Dave and lInear power supply

“I’m a big believer in a good power supply”
@carlsbad

I share your beliefs 💯 . I am sure the stock power supply performs well but until you have compared a modified Dave with Farad PS side by side, you do not know what you’re missing out. That Farad PS upgrade looks impressive in every conceivable way. When I was shopping for my ultimate DAC, power supply and master clock implementation was right up there along with SQ. My DAC have both standard power supply and external power supply options, you can guess which option I end up with :-)

Even though you’re very satisfied with stock power supply, I highly recommend you consider the Farad upgrade.

@lalitk 

I had been using Synergistic blue cable which made large improvement over stock cable.

But Farad power supply made much more improvement than Synergistic blue cable

Thomas

I've had similar results buying a low noise LPS for my tiny tripath high-pass amplifier (in a tri-amped system). Much more natural, less grainy, less hash.

More surprising, swapping the iFi audio low noise wall-wart PSU that came with my iFi PDIF iPurifier 2 with a 30$ low noise 5V LPS from aliExpress also gave great improvement, which I didn't expect: more natural, again, less "stringent" upper treble, more depth. 

Many have reported that the power supply in Dave though small in size, indeed performs well and changing it yields no improvement. That is what Chord’s John Franks says.

Very cheap parts.  Very expensive PR.

I've owned a PS Audio Directstream, Bricasti M1, Jeff Rowland Aeris, and currently own a Chord Dave DAC. The Dave may have a cheap power supply, but I have yet to hear a DAC in it's price range that I prefer in my system. That being said, I would love to do a direct comparison between the Dave, MSB Premier and Playback Design Edelweiss. At one point I considered the Aries Cerat Helene DAC, but after listening to the Aeris Cerat Incito preamp in my system I'm no longer interested.