Intriguing subject. My understanding is battery "impedance" is the issue. It is possible the inverter has some ps regulation circuits that help deliver lower ps impedance, but I personally wouldn't want all those switching devices near my ps. I wonder how Jeff Rowland designed his battery powered preamps ?
Took the lithium ion battery plunge
After reading here about the sonic improvements of using a lithium ion power station to power your system I decided to give it a try. I bought a Jackery 290 one of their smallest units.
My system's front stage (TT, phono pre, preamp) is plugged into an ExactPower power regenerator plugged into the wall. Power amp is directly plugged into the wall. My initial plan was to only power the turntable and phono pre with the battery thinking the tube preamp would suck too much juice. A cool feature most of these lithium batteries have is a display showing your wattage draw from plugged in devices. My turntable running and phono pre were only drawing about 18-23 watts. With the tube preamp plugged in it was drawing around 50-55 watts. The battery is rated at 290 watt hours so that would give roughly 5+ hours of listening time (290 ÷ 55). Perfect as this is roughly how long my listening sessions are.
I fired up the system. Here's the condensed review: I'm never going back to ac line power again lol.
Here's the long review: I thought I had a pretty good black background before. WRONG! I hate to come off as shill sounding but this was a night and day difference. That whole lifting the veil thing I see here frequently happened. It wasn't subtle. Everything was more defined and just natural sounding. I am made aware of this every time I run the system and plug the regenerator back into the wall (which is a synergistic research Teslaplex) to warm everything up without draining the battery. I wait in anticipation to get it plugged into the battery.
Ok enough shilling here are the cons and what has kept many from taking the plunge themselves. Fan noise. It's not quiet. The fan didn't need to run with only the turntable and phono pre plugged in but it sure did with the tube preamp also plugged in. I listen at high volume though so it's not audible. Any low level listening would be impossible if you have the unit in the same room as you. There are ways around this that I'm considering. Even at full 55 watt draw over a few hours it's still blowing cool air from the fan. I see others have disconnected the fan at your own risk of course. Or I may just put a cardboard box over it with a notch cut out for the power cable. Longevity is another issue. These batteries have a finite life cycle of between 500-3000 charges depending on brand and model. This means whatever you spend on it you will be spending again or more down the road to replace it. However despite all of this I'm not going back. The sound is that good!
Overview: Lithium ion battery power is a game changer if your setup and listening habits support it. If you listen at low levels and aren't willing to do something about the fan it won't work. If your system plays daily and for long hours you may be going through batteries pretty fast. I usually only get quality listening time on the weekends so not an issue for me really.
The end result is the sound is too good to me to go back despite the cons listed.
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How well one of these battery packs performs compared to AC depends on quality of AC supplying system. No conditioning, battery wins, AC somewhat optimized,battery may or may not win, fully optimized AC, AC wins IME. I've looked inside some of these battery packs,pretty low level components, my AC chain far better components.
I've owned two battery powered components, N.E.W DCA66, class A SS amp running off 4 wheelchair batteries which I sold rather recently, Merlin BAM for VSM-MM speakers, runs off 4 9v rechargeable batteries, still own this.
Any future battery power experiments I may run would require high level inverter and big lithium ion batteries. |
Batteries are always cleaner sounding than stuff plugged into a wall. That said, when you’re listening to battery power you’re actually listening the power regulator on a battery. It’s the thing that convert the batteries native voltage to the final output voltage. That’s why one lithium battery might sound different from another. Batteries are a quick and easy way to get to clean sound, but their inconvenience in terms of maintenance and charging become a chore over the long term. |
@ghdprentice No I do not have dedicated lines as I rent. I'll work on getting some photos up thanks! @roadcykler Forgive me, subtle it was not. @carlsbad I put the unit in the back under my component rack to muffle the sound. I never claimed a totally black background. It sounds better than my ac line at my listening volume and I don't hear the fan. |
When people say "batteries are always better" I don't know if they realize tht battery power is inverted to supply your equipment and the rectified so the quality of the inverter is very important. Cheap inverters used to be total crap. I've seen inverters that actually ouput square waves. I assume there have been recent advances but it seems unlikely that an inverter in a $300 rig is extremely high quality. I like the comment about output impedence. Indeed that is very important. One reason PS Audio rules the power regenerator business is that their supplies have almost zero output imedence. My PS Audio PP10 costs 20x as much as the battery/inverter that @blue_collar_audio_guy posted about. If this is being proposed as a less expensive alternative I respect that and totally support it. I often see it proposed as "better than your expensive power regenerator" and I am still skeptical about that. I'd love to have one to compare. I could order one from amazon and return it but that just doesn't seem fair to the seller. Jerry
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