Sabaj A20a modification... worth the effort?

That is the opposite of the reality. In general houses built since the eighties have PE wall sockets for safety. With older houses it is up to the owner to update the electrical installation but this will change.

Since the sixties connection points are mounted in the ceilings/light points. This “centraaldozensysteem” has the PE wire more often than not running through it. Connecting an extra PE wire and pulling it through the PVC piping is an easy job too. In practice one can realise a PE socket in less than an hour. I have solved and helped to realise this quite a few times.

It is mandatory for safety AND for correct functioning of mains filters in devices with SMPS. Apparently it is a weak spot for many an audiophile and it often is neglected.

The Sabaj A20a does hiss at maximum volume. Please try it out carefully.

Not over here. I only have mains earth in the kitchen and at the washing machine place. Maybe most of the people I know live in old houses but I don't see many earth sockets anywhere.

Like I said, the Sabaj amp I bought from you has a slight hiss, the other two are totally dead quiet. They might be a newer version, I don't know
 
I'm running one of the Sabaj amps on a B&C DE250 on a horn. This combo has a sensitivity of 106-108dB/1m and I don't hear any hissing or wining or other noise other than a very faint white noise, unnoticable from my listening position. I do have to mention that I'm running them from un-earthed outlets. In my country we don't have any mains earth in our living rooms. Maybe that's the difference?

We should set how we define that before we talk about hiss/whine. All the talk I made about white noise is with ears to speakers meaning you take your head and hover it with one of your ears (preferrably the better one) right next to your speakers tweeter dome. From the listening position we cannot draw a valueable comparison, for we all sit differently to our speakers.

As long as you measure "hiss by ~1m" I am pretty sure none of the Sabaj A20a has notable "hissing", neither by RCA nor by XLR. However, the hissing with ears directly to tweeter I was finally able to reduce to 97% of volume being silent as a grave (with galvanically isolated RCA, which should basically behave like XLR). Just buy this thing, it works magic with the amp! No need to open up the amp for it, just wrap the AC cable around multiple times shortly before the plug (to amp): https://www.arrow.com/en/products/b64290l40x830/epcos-tdk
 
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Not over here. I only have mains earth in the kitchen and at the washing machine place. Maybe most of the people I know live in old houses but I don't see many earth sockets anywhere.

Like I said, the Sabaj amp I bought from you has a slight hiss, the other two are totally dead quiet. They might be a newer version, I don't know

If Danibourn comes this way he could tell you. He has the first version, dead silence on XLR.

I have version 2, ditto in my case. The difference on the version, the engineers have deactivated the super power saving mode on the SMSP Mornson.

It was Tokio on ASR who had found this problem, when a sustained solicitation in the bass, a relay in the SMSP was triggered several times and you could hear the clicking sounds with the ear close to the amplifier housing.
 
Most FDA are completely silent...
My experience with several FDA's digital inputs : Absolutely dead silent...when no input signal. I thus created the more "silent" track loop i could that still alternatively triggers the chip (4s "signal" followed by 4s silence), and use it to hear their effective noise (and start pops). I could not say they where silent (except the SMSL AD18).
 
Not over here. I only have mains earth in the kitchen and at the washing machine place. Maybe most of the people I know live in old houses but I don't see many earth sockets anywhere.

Like I said, the Sabaj amp I bought from you has a slight hiss, the other two are totally dead quiet. They might be a newer version, I don't know

As said it is the opposite of the usual situation in NL and it is easily solved. The house owners responsibility will also be to update the installation to already decades old regulations.

Ah you bought the A20a. That is a V2 so most recent version. Since it has a 3 prong IEC inlet it must be connected to a wall socket with PE to have its mains filter working correctly. Probably also a potential voltage can be measured between Audio GND and PE. The casing will likely have 115V on it (low current but still unwanted). The famous and often misunderstood “tingling” feeling when touching the casing.

Connecting 3 prong stuff to 2 prong sockets = user error. Also plain unsafe.
 
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Google tells me that all houses from 1996 on up have mains earth which means that around 90% of the houses over here do not have mains earth in the living room yet. I guess I just don't know many people that live in a modern house.

In my mains system I do have mains earth, it is a dedicated group. The Sabaj are in my bedroom system. But this is all of topic.
 
Personally, connected in XLR, no noise, much less than with RCA ...
Power supply interference is frequent ..... you just have to have neons, led, tv, laptop power supply, photovoltaic inverter and more .... with a huge rejection rate ...
at home when I turn on the light in my garage (led lamp, I no longer receive fm of my radio alarm clock) ...
we should try to cut all the circuit breakers to isolate the problem except the one that powers the amplifier,
the electric wires behave like antennas especially if there is no earth wire and put a super amp socket at 500 euros will not change anything .... or then made like me all my pc and amps audio are are connect whith an 1200VA inverter:cheers:
 
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A good mains filter (with PE connection) on a separare audio group may work ok. An isolation transformer is the icing on the cake. I wish it wouldn’t be but the isolation transformer is one of the better upgrades.
 
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Google tells me that all houses from 1996 on up have mains earth which means that around 90% of the houses over here do not have mains earth in the living room yet. I guess I just don't know many people that live in a modern house.

In my mains system I do have mains earth, it is a dedicated group. The Sabaj are in my bedroom system. But this is all of topic.

If you mean the place where you live that may be correct (many old houses) but it still should be solved as it is a safety issue. In 1996 ALL wall sockets in private homes had to be with PE but it was already done in the eighties. 90% is exxagerated as many houses built way before that year were updated when they changed owner. It is not that off topic. Since it is not connected the right way performance will be less optimal.

In the eighties we calculated the average private home power consumption to be 400VA 😉 Can you imagine? With old TV sets, filament bulb and other energy wasting stuff now banned. Now look at the consumption of the average even green minded person….
 
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The electrical network in Europe does not only balance 50 Hz ...
There are plenty of frequencies under carrier, for off-peak time communication and much more ...
new meters such as linky in france send frequencies for remote analysis of consumption ...

Anyway ... I'm going to put my amp on batteries .... (hydrogen):yes:
 
It looks like I've finally found a winner after 4 new amps in the space of 2 weeks. I just received an Aiyima A04 (TPA3251) & this thing is genuinely near silent.

On these 91dB speakers at my nearfield desk listening position (roughly 1m from the drivers), the hiss from the 32dB gain TPA3116 amp was easily audible. The Sabaj A20a/A10a were markedly better, but the hiss was still audible from that distance, without having to lean in towards the speakers.

With the A04 with the volume set to max & my ear against the driver I genuinely cannot tell the amp is on from the left speaker & I have to really listen closely to tell from the right speaker.

That said, the A04 definitely has much lower input sensitivity than either of the Sabaj amps - in particular I believe the later revisions of the A04 actually ended up lowering the sensitivity. It's not an issue for me, as my DAC puts out enough voltage to drive my speakers louder than I want... at least while living in this apartment!
 
The gain being lower ..... the noise is lower ....
Too bad, the sabaj is really superior in every way compared to the tpa 32.. chips ...

the gain and sensitivity of the sabaj is confusing .... we could almost plug a microphone on the line input at 0 dB ..

At -20 dB no noise, the sound is.... just beautiful !!!!

I manage the volume then by my dac.
really too bad you.😕
 
the sabaj is really superior in every way

I have to say the build quality of the cheaper Aiyima is definitely better than the Sabaj. With both of my Sabaj the dials were so wobbly I thought the first one was broken when I received it!

The Sabaj amps sounded great if I ignored the background noise, but that was impossible to do when no sound was playing. I'm sure if you get a good sample they're amazing amps, but alas the QC just doesn't seem to be there.