Tír Na HiFi

nige2000 wrote:

jkeny wrote:Nige, I thought that mobo might be of interest to you - it does seem to tick some boxes
The gold plated stuff I always put in the "audiophile" category but who knows, there may be something to it?
Anyway, I might go this route once I find which of the 10 different versions of this mobo is most suitable (I don't need or want the opamp audio, for instance)

there will be no benefit until theres linear regs on it, everything still need to be bypassed and isolated

Oh, I know that, Nige but as a platform to start from, it may be the best, so far?
Bypassing the VRM is the one experiment that I'm really interested in hearing the results of but this will take some care & experimenting to achieve
Just looking at the other ARM based motherboards - a number of them still seem to use VRMs so biting this bullet is probably crucial.
I have some old 486 based mobos to experiment with (& kill) but no time.

is the fancy caps not for the on board audio?
and the dac usb same as usual with a separate/its own regulator which can be switched on or off,
would we not be better with a off board linear or battery supply for dacs and the os?
everything else looks very normal?

think its going to need to be a home brew mobo mod
using one of the simpler mobos to remove switching regs and provide clean power to all necessary components

nige2000 wrote:is the fancy caps not for the on board audio?

The fancy audiophile ones are but it makes a point of mentioning solid caps (like Oscons) on the VRM also?

and the dac usb same as usual with a separate/its own regulator which can be switched on or off,
would we not be better with a off board linear or battery supply for dacs and the os?
everything else looks very normal?

Yes better with battery off-board PS but I guess my thinking is that if they have gone to a bit of trouble in the design to address PS noise then it might have a more generalised effect i.e VRM. Also if the extra dosh for this mobo is small then why not use it?

think its going to need to be a home brew mobo mod
using one of the simpler mobos to remove switching regs and provide clean power to all necessary components

I agree but they nearly all seem to use VRM switching to control PS so this is the component/module to target for next mods (there may be other switchers also) - if we can bypass & substitute for this on one mobo, we should be able to do so on most all other mobos. If we can find one without VRM, it will make the experiment so much easier

found these videos
and still not convinced they will be better
as i think we have addressed the issues better so far

nige2000 wrote: found these videos
and still not convinced they will be better
as i think we have addressed the issues better so far

I agree, it's mostly BS marketing, including the LED trace but I wasn't suggesting that these boards are fine without tweaking but rather that if there is no financial hit then one of them (there are 10 models in the H81 range) might suit as a better starter platform for tweaking

The board is also huge!!

im sure there great boards for general use
its not all BS but were sort of gone off into the deep end ( or off the end :) )

the gold plated stuff amuses me
thought the purpose of gold was to give better contact because it was less prone to corrosion, maybe dj and band equipment but cant see it been an issue for domestic use, otherwise we would use silver?

My hope is/was that it had a better VRM which might translate into an audible improvement. Remember, the VRM is the last untouched element of our tweaked mobos & so we are somewhat at the mercy of the quality of this implementation. Like all SMPSes they come in a variety of different qualities as far as audio is concerned. The Gigabyte's use of low RDSon Mosfets & solid capacitors augers well as a mark of quality & possibly better audio quality as a result.

suppose this is the mark 1 version
not as tidy as i hoped to do it (times not on my side)

power supplies and pc build
see main kill switch on side which isolates the battery, power supply and mobo

hopefully i didnt lose any sq by tidying it up a bit

to be picky I wouldn't have the tx so close to each other and would route the ac and dc cables separately

ya im not very experienced

the tx's interfere with one another?

what way would you route the ac dc cables (diagram?)

should this sound worse than when i had it sprawled out over the floor?