Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

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RE: Quest to Find the Perfect Power Source for my Raspberry PI3

Posted by soundchekk on February 22, 2017 at 00:50:35:
Hi.

IMO quite some nonsense is spread in this thread.

E.g

1. Dynabots comments.

Just to clarify:

The PI doesn't regulate 5V. It takes it as is.

The external 5V (at whatever quality) will be forwarded to

1. interntal buckconverters <=3.3V
2. USB power rails
3. GPIO
4. HDMI

By feeding 5V into GPIO you'll loose protection.

Or

2. Abe Collins rather cynic response.
One of those audiophiles who'd never consider a PI as source.
He'd better stick with a crappy $8 wallwart.

3. Non of the linear supplies mentioned lists any measurements
iPower are <1uV in audioband and <30uV incl. switching noise
and mains noise

4. Buying a linear and filtering that with a DC iPurifier
that's IMO nonsense and waste of money.

***********************

I own several linears incl. Sbooster supplies.
No way I'd swap out my iPower.
I even prefer my iPower over a DIY LiFePO4-TPS7A4700 combo.

Beside that the iPower can supply 2.5A. You don't want to replace that with a 1A supply.

Obviously your application matters.
If you use the GPIO or USB power rails to feed your DAC
the main supply can make a huge difference.

The iPower can slightly fall short - depending on application - when it comes current/time. That's a factor that can make the difference some associate to linear supplies.

To squeeze most of the iPower I therefore added a fast cap buffer at the
end of cable.

I also shortened the cable by 2/3.
Such a long cable for 5V DC as supplied by iFi IMO is a bad idea.

I forwarded these proposals to iFi (Thorsten Loesch) btw.

To me the 1. question is not what's better linear or switching.
The first question would be: What are the relevant differences.

To me this "linear PS is better" subject, must be considered old
school audiophile thinking.
These supplies burn more power, are more expensive and many of them
are not any better then well made switching supplies.

For best performance I power RPI and (HAT-) DAC separately.

Good luck on your journey.

Enjoy.