The Furutech ADL DAC is a five star and 5 globe awarded product, it has received the top accolade from both Hi-Fi World and Hi-Fi Choice magazines, it is however not just a DAC, read on for the full story.
Mains Cables R Us along with Londog Audio have sold 100's of linear power supply's for a variety of DAC's, streamers, NAS drives, routers and much more. The majority of our customers are highly delighted with many reporting massive improvements in sound quality. We sent out PSU's to Hi-Fi Choice for their opinion, they gave the Squeezebox Touch PSU 5 stars and were amazed at the differnece our design made to the sound quality, the same was said about the Arcam R-DAC supply and that also received 5 stars. The design is now a proven concept, take the final regulation stage as near to the load being driven as possible.
Any piece of hi-fi equipment currently powered by a switch mode power supply or wall wart as it is known WILL BENEFIT from using our power supply, for many it is a no brainer with the benefits far out-weighing the costs. Feeding your equipment with a fully regulated linear power supply increases soundstaging, lowers the noise floor, makes the treble sweeter and less harsh and improves sundstaging immensely. Those are our customers words not our sales speak! We have tested the DAC extensively ourselves including trialling it against many of the most popular current wave of DAC's and it holds it's own well.
The Furutech ADL Esprit DAC is an excellent piece of kit, a fully fledged DAC and headphone amplifer, pre-amp built in and able to record vinyl onto a pc, it has been described by Hi-Fi World magazine as "something of a domestic hi-fi revelation" it does however have an achiles heel and that is the power supply. A SMPS, granted slightly better than some we have heard but still injecting noise into the mains as do most smps's. This DAC does benefit enormously from our own linear PSU, it needs to be heard to be believed.
These are the ideas behind the design from the designer himself, Nick Gorham of Longdog Audio...
When thinking of regulation, it’s worth remembering the Roman god Janus. Who was the god of gateways, and was a two faced god looking in both directions. Likewise a good voltage regulator is required to look in both directions at once. From one direction you have the mains supply, with the ever increasing noise, distortion and random variation that exists on our household mains supply. In the other direction you have the device you are supplying power to. The load will be asking constantly varying current, and the job of the regulator will be to ignore the varying load and to supply a rock steady voltage that ignores the changing load.
To ask a single regulator to perform both tasks means that it can not do either as well as it could. We don’t ask our regulators to be two faced, we split the two functions into two separate regulators and put them both where they can do the best job.
The first regulator is close to the mains supply, its job is to take the incoming mains and convert it into a low(ish) noise DC supply, and to isolate the mess that is our household power lines from what follows. In most power supplies on the market, the output of the first stage would be directly connected to the load device, and that would certainly be an improvement over the supplies that most manufactures provide. But we can do better by adding the other face of Janus to the system.
The second regulator is supplied with a clean low noise supply, and its job is to handle the changing demands of the load. To do that, it needs to be as close to the load as possible. So we remove the second regulator from the main box, and place it close to the load, both electrically and physically, that removes it from the noise and interference of the mains supply, and allows it to spend its time looking towards the load. Typical commercial voltage regulator chips are general purpose devices, but are not quiet enough for the task on hand, so the second regulator uses a bespoke regulator based on a low noise multi stage filtered voltage reference, a low noise error amplifier and a high current low resistance mosfet. To allow it to handle the changing load it also needs to supply current on demand, so all the remaining space in the second regulator is filled with low impedance capacitors to act as a local energy source.
Using the two stages of regulator, we achieve a noise floor equal or better than most battery supplies, and a effective source resistance of the order of 0.02 ohm (and the short cable run to the load avoids increasing this valve by adding copper where its not needed, and the use of a discrete regulator design allows that tiny value to be maintained way above frequency any audio device operates at.
The power supply comes as standard with an Oyaide gold plated audio grade DC power plug, further up-grades are available to further enhance the performance. The up-grades are not superfluous, they are designed to add the extra degree of realism and cater for the audiophile who demands the very best.
The units are built to order within 4-5 days, 120V or 240V and available with a free basic power lead to suit your country included in the price, if you do decide to up-grade the power cable the correct plug will be fitted to suit your country be it UK | EU | USA | NZ | AUS etc, etc. We ship globally and have sold PSU's to most parts of the world.
If you want to hear what your Esprit DAC is really capable of here is the PSU on our website.
MCRU are authorized Furutech agents, if you wish to purchase the DAC and PSU together you can do so on the power supply product page and get a small discount off the pair.
Mains Cables R Us along with Londog Audio have sold 100's of linear power supply's for a variety of DAC's, streamers, NAS drives, routers and much more. The majority of our customers are highly delighted with many reporting massive improvements in sound quality. We sent out PSU's to Hi-Fi Choice for their opinion, they gave the Squeezebox Touch PSU 5 stars and were amazed at the differnece our design made to the sound quality, the same was said about the Arcam R-DAC supply and that also received 5 stars. The design is now a proven concept, take the final regulation stage as near to the load being driven as possible.
Any piece of hi-fi equipment currently powered by a switch mode power supply or wall wart as it is known WILL BENEFIT from using our power supply, for many it is a no brainer with the benefits far out-weighing the costs. Feeding your equipment with a fully regulated linear power supply increases soundstaging, lowers the noise floor, makes the treble sweeter and less harsh and improves sundstaging immensely. Those are our customers words not our sales speak! We have tested the DAC extensively ourselves including trialling it against many of the most popular current wave of DAC's and it holds it's own well.
The Furutech ADL Esprit DAC is an excellent piece of kit, a fully fledged DAC and headphone amplifer, pre-amp built in and able to record vinyl onto a pc, it has been described by Hi-Fi World magazine as "something of a domestic hi-fi revelation" it does however have an achiles heel and that is the power supply. A SMPS, granted slightly better than some we have heard but still injecting noise into the mains as do most smps's. This DAC does benefit enormously from our own linear PSU, it needs to be heard to be believed.
These are the ideas behind the design from the designer himself, Nick Gorham of Longdog Audio...
When thinking of regulation, it’s worth remembering the Roman god Janus. Who was the god of gateways, and was a two faced god looking in both directions. Likewise a good voltage regulator is required to look in both directions at once. From one direction you have the mains supply, with the ever increasing noise, distortion and random variation that exists on our household mains supply. In the other direction you have the device you are supplying power to. The load will be asking constantly varying current, and the job of the regulator will be to ignore the varying load and to supply a rock steady voltage that ignores the changing load.
To ask a single regulator to perform both tasks means that it can not do either as well as it could. We don’t ask our regulators to be two faced, we split the two functions into two separate regulators and put them both where they can do the best job.
The first regulator is close to the mains supply, its job is to take the incoming mains and convert it into a low(ish) noise DC supply, and to isolate the mess that is our household power lines from what follows. In most power supplies on the market, the output of the first stage would be directly connected to the load device, and that would certainly be an improvement over the supplies that most manufactures provide. But we can do better by adding the other face of Janus to the system.
The second regulator is supplied with a clean low noise supply, and its job is to handle the changing demands of the load. To do that, it needs to be as close to the load as possible. So we remove the second regulator from the main box, and place it close to the load, both electrically and physically, that removes it from the noise and interference of the mains supply, and allows it to spend its time looking towards the load. Typical commercial voltage regulator chips are general purpose devices, but are not quiet enough for the task on hand, so the second regulator uses a bespoke regulator based on a low noise multi stage filtered voltage reference, a low noise error amplifier and a high current low resistance mosfet. To allow it to handle the changing load it also needs to supply current on demand, so all the remaining space in the second regulator is filled with low impedance capacitors to act as a local energy source.
Using the two stages of regulator, we achieve a noise floor equal or better than most battery supplies, and a effective source resistance of the order of 0.02 ohm (and the short cable run to the load avoids increasing this valve by adding copper where its not needed, and the use of a discrete regulator design allows that tiny value to be maintained way above frequency any audio device operates at.
The power supply comes as standard with an Oyaide gold plated audio grade DC power plug, further up-grades are available to further enhance the performance. The up-grades are not superfluous, they are designed to add the extra degree of realism and cater for the audiophile who demands the very best.
The units are built to order within 4-5 days, 120V or 240V and available with a free basic power lead to suit your country included in the price, if you do decide to up-grade the power cable the correct plug will be fitted to suit your country be it UK | EU | USA | NZ | AUS etc, etc. We ship globally and have sold PSU's to most parts of the world.
If you want to hear what your Esprit DAC is really capable of here is the PSU on our website.
MCRU are authorized Furutech agents, if you wish to purchase the DAC and PSU together you can do so on the power supply product page and get a small discount off the pair.