A 'ValueCap' power supply for the ALWSR Super regulator
And with the lid on. This one was only configured to power a Naim pre-amp, hence no extraneous sockets on the back...
And the sound? Our assumption had been that the quality of the ALW Super Reg would be the dominant factor, hence our decision to cost-cut everything else.
We slotted ValueCap2 (soon nick-named 'the flat one') into my friends system and immediately were aware of the vast improvement (in our opinion) over his ageing Snaps supply. A very enjoyable evening was had just playing record after record. As it happened I had also taken ValueCap1 (aka 'the fat one') with me, just to show off its innards, but at the end of the evening we thought we'd give it a try.
To be honest we were both a bit stunned and couldn't quite work out what we were at first hearing. The fat one sounded almost as good again as the flat one had over the Snaps. The only significant difference between the two being the transformer - flat one: 160VA ILP, the fat one: a 330VA from Maplin (chosen because it was cheap and it's all they had in stock). I left both supplies with my friend for the next few weeks and he did indeed confirm that the fat one was miles better than the flat one.
This left me with a bit of a dilemma. I couldn't leave my friend with the impoverished sounding flat one yet I couldn't use it with my own pre-amp due to the latter's requirement for a separate muting relay connection. In the end we decided to ditch the 'value' approach and re-build the flat one using some top-notch transformers ...
We slotted ValueCap2 (soon nick-named 'the flat one') into my friends system and immediately were aware of the vast improvement (in our opinion) over his ageing Snaps supply. A very enjoyable evening was had just playing record after record. As it happened I had also taken ValueCap1 (aka 'the fat one') with me, just to show off its innards, but at the end of the evening we thought we'd give it a try.
To be honest we were both a bit stunned and couldn't quite work out what we were at first hearing. The fat one sounded almost as good again as the flat one had over the Snaps. The only significant difference between the two being the transformer - flat one: 160VA ILP, the fat one: a 330VA from Maplin (chosen because it was cheap and it's all they had in stock). I left both supplies with my friend for the next few weeks and he did indeed confirm that the fat one was miles better than the flat one.
This left me with a bit of a dilemma. I couldn't leave my friend with the impoverished sounding flat one yet I couldn't use it with my own pre-amp due to the latter's requirement for a separate muting relay connection. In the end we decided to ditch the 'value' approach and re-build the flat one using some top-notch transformers ...