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Hey Rick!

Always good to hear from you. Sorry for the slow response... busy week at work. I believe I still owe you some responses from posts you made a week or so ago too.

Interesting news about Davenport and the LT3080. I can see that tho... I've heard that cascaded regulators may not sound as good in most situations as single ones. And since he has local regs on the DAC board, the LT3080 isn't really needed. I do find the larger C curious... don't they say something about 'minimum reactance' in their PS designs?

And of course, that he isn't using it in his raw DC supply does not mean it's a bad reg... just that the choice of setup he's using now (no reg there since he has them downstream) sounds better.

Did you see Thorsten's description of his NOS TDA1541-based DAC in the Tube DIY Asylum here:

http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/t.mpl?f=tubediy&m=186140

He's gone to some interesting PS configurations including a lot of RC or LC filtering... look at his LCR phono stage or the Cole phono he designed for DIY Audio (I have one of these to finish up someday as I get a phono setup running again). But of course, to prove that there's no absolute truth, it sounds like he has some cascaded regs in the DAC PS.

Very curious about the Belleson regs. Someday I need to try one and also compare it to the Dexa (which are less expensive). But I'm leaning towards either PH ones or no-feedback shunts like the Salas ones from DIYAudio... based on some comments from John Curl & Charles Hansen about not liking feedback regs. I do think either of these will handily beat the standard 317-LT1083-LT3080 regs... just as the Dexa beat them in my Juli@ mods.

Also curious about what you described as 'dreaminess' with the choke-filtered PS for the Juli@. Can you say more about that sound?

The treble difference of the LT3080s in my dirty supplies still seems mostly positive... maybe a bit dry tho. I did not 'sex' the poly filtering caps (Wimas) across the voltage-setting R's, so I'll likely do that this weekend and see if it makes a diff. They also may just need some break-in time. Or it could be something else.

I also plan to put LT3080's into all the single positions (ATX-24 3.3v & 12v, P4 12v) in my linear supplies this weekend and that should tell me a lot about how they sound.

But that slight sense of treble 'dryness' notwithstanding, I'm still very happy with the sound after the LT3080 regs in the dirty supples and the P4 powered from my dirty AC circuit. The 'transparent' range has been extended up and down in the spectrum quite a bit and dynamics are well-improved.

On the bleed resistor, I remember a long time ago reading that the 317/337 worked better when providing about 1/2 the max current and the way to do this was to add ballast R's at the load if it didn't draw enough. A lot of my DIY stuff using these regs from that era ('80s) use these R's, but I can't say I ever heard a diff from this. Worth checking out with this reg, tho.

The dirty supply for my HDD is a single transformer providing about 11v or so raw DC that I regulate down to 5v. These laptop drives only need the 5v line (I'm pretty sure that's true of all SATA drives) and I measured about 900MaH peaks with my drive, so the LT3080 works ok. I'm using a standard-rotation drive (5400 RPM instead of 7200 RPM) and this helps keep the current down.

Your setup sounds like it is really satisfying now. I suspect at least a good bit of it is your 'alternative' casing... and of course the K&K DAC, which is one that would be on my list if I were not sorta-scratching DACs. And IMHO, you will be even happier with the improvement made by linear supplies. And I have to finish getting a phono setup running again so I have a good point of comparison.

On PCI latency, I'd have to go and check, but I believe the GA-G31M-S2L board I'm using only offers 128 as an option, so I'm pretty sure that's what I'm using. Will let you know.

Later dude!

Greg in Mississippi
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