GBB%YKTVMZ.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Gary Bronner) (03/13/91)
With the recent discussion of the effect of Tice Power Block conditioners on the sound of audio components I thought I would throw in my experience with a heavily modified CD player and an isolation transformer. My CD player is a Magnavox 472 that I have extensively reworked. It has the premium grade D/A converter and digital filter, all the capacitors hanging off the D/A have been switched to high quality film caps (polypros), and the output stage has been reworked so that it uses all discrete components, i.e. no op amps in the signal path. In addition the power supplies have been upgraded so that the analog stage is powered off of a separate transformer with heavy regulation and the D/A has dedicated regulators. This is fed into a home built tube preamplifier, J. Curcio's Daniel preamp, which was described in The Audio Amateur, several years back which in turn feeds a Threshold S/200 power amplifier. Several different speakers were tried, including JSE model 1's as well as several home built speakers. The experiment I ran was comparing the sound of the system with everything plugged into the same wall socket to the sound with the CD player powered via a small isolation transformer. I picked up the transformer at an electronics flea market several years back for a few dollars. It is fairly nondescript and looks as if it would be rated at about 100watts, although it is not labelled. The differences I heard are similar to those described by Ray Chowkwanyun when he used the Tice Power Block conditioner. The imaging improved with the soundstage seeming to get deeper and extend further to the left and right of the speakers. The bass seemed to improve with better definition and for lack of a better term tunefulness. The differences were not subtle and are easily heard by non audiophiles. I can't comment on why the isolation transformer improves the sound so much, but I have left it in my system and feel that it now allows the sound of my CD player to approach that of a very good LP system. I welcome theories on why this works. I would have thought that the heavily regulated power supplies in my CD player would have eliminated the effect of the power line. What I'm wondering now is how the more expensive Tice Power Block compares to the simple isolation transformer I used. Has anyone made the comparison? If so please let me know. Gary Bronner IBM Research