External Power Supply For My Audiolab 6000CDT CD Transport

@mitch4t 

I also have the 6000CDT and will be curious to hear your progress. I also bought the TP power supply for my BS Node and it definitely made an improvement.

I wouldn't pay too much attention to architecture of power supply.  There are extremely quiet resonant mode SMPS that switch at zero voltage / zero current, while Linear Power Supplies are in reality primitive switchers that operate at 120Hz producing a lot of high frequency noise (switching at max voltage) and the only "Linear" part of it is that they are line and load unregulated (at least in power amps).  Benchmark reduced noise by 10dB by switching from linear power supply in DAC1 to SMPS in DAC2 and DAC3.  SMPS got Really bad rap from noisy computer applications, but can be wonderful if done right.  My Benchmark AHB2 has SMPS and is very quiet.   All current Rowland products contain SMPS (even preamps). Why then well designed SMPS are not that popular?  Perhaps because of demand - people believe it has to be heavy to deliver a lot of power while "switching" has to be noisy.  After all class D is controlled SMPS.  If it is quiet enough for an amp it should be good enough just for power supply.

@kijanki good points. I have Chord Hugo TT2 that uses SMPS and sounds fine. It’s all in the quality of the SMPS and implementation. However, I do prefer a good quality and properly implemented linear power supply as in my experience the transients and dynamics are typically better with components utilizing linear supply with good filtering. 

In case of Audiolab, I wouldn’t screw around with the power supply there. But I would deaden the case - there are plenty of real estate there to apply some noise and vibration isolating Dynamat. Check out this video:

https://youtu.be/VoxC3st7WQw

@audphile1   I believe there are fantastic power supplies in either technology, but SMPS are way more complex to design (and perhaps harder to repair).  Rowland's SMPS operate at extremely high switching frequency (incredible 1MHz) that is much easier to filter out than 120Hz in linear supplies.  Small ferrite couple of inch transformer operating at high frequency can deliver as much power as 50 lbs iron transformer operating at 60Hz.   

I'd just like to take a moment and remind everybody that the prevalence of SMPS in digital applications is because they make absolutely no performance difference in the digital domain. And the low-voltage/multi Gigahertz requirements there are not insubstantial, far greater than the low bandwidth requirements of audio.