in this box is a pci express power
filter card it claims to smooth out the dirty power
from bad components and improve the audio signals coming out of your pc
and what we're going to do is we're going to feed it a worst case scenario
with a super cheap 1000 watt power supply along with a very coil whiny
graphics card to see if it actually makes any appreciable difference to
sound quality my expectations
well i wasn't born yesterday so
pretty low speaking of born yesterday though
i wrote a children's board book and we just got our first set of mostly final
samples so if you or anyone you know works for a bookseller and wants to have
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who are still too young for a next-gen console for christmas contact us at
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order
before we can get into this card and what we expect we have to talk about
power and how it's converted from the mains ac power out of your wall to the
dc power that your hardware works with most pcs today use what's called a
switch mode or switching power supply this is mostly because compared to a
linear power supply they are smaller lighter and more efficient a switching
power supply can be as much as 80 smaller and can have efficiencies as
high as 96 compared to the peak of around 60
for a linear power supply but that doesn't mean that switching
power supplies like this one don't have any downsides
and one of them is that they create more electrical noise
if you've ever turned on a speaker and heard a s
or when no audio is being played that's
exactly what i'm talking about quote-unquote dirty power can rear its
ugly head from the external supply things like voltage spikes or low or
unbalanced ac power like we have here in our building or even internally within
the system after the conversion to dc from components like graphics cards or
other chips now efficient autos of high-end audio
have tried a huge variety of ways to mitigate this unwanted electrical noise
with varying levels of success one of the
most common methods of noise suppression is power conditioning where essentially
you use a device that takes the less than desirable power that it's given
then acts as a buffer outputting a nice clean ac power signal to sensitive audio
hardware farther down the line if you watched our overview of the abyss
diana headphones you may remember this
monster of an amp tower this is the sort of thing that has had
plenty of forethought given to power delivery for example where is it
where is it there it is ah
actually it fell pretty flat it's probably fine for example
for example look at this plug here with its bi-directional noise containment
technology thing is most people don't have
thousand dollars to buy an amp stack to power their speakers what if they just
wanna use a pc well that's where this
at least in theory comes in meet the l fidelity axf 107 magician a
pci express power purifying filter fresh out of senzen china it sports seven
different capacitors seven different capacitors it supports seven different
capacitors and wouldn't you know it they even threw in a little bit of RGB for
good measure although i'm only going to give them half points
for that because to change the colors you actually have to flip these little
dip switches here with a pin now it claims to and i quote here
prevent video card coil wine and improve overclocking as well as reduce noise
floor for an ultimate pc audio build spec that is that is quite the claim
wow you know like if one 40 dollar card can
create ultimate pc audio spec i will be
shocked just as shocked as it was to hear that
we've got a new shirt check it out it's CPU pins but if you look really close
actually if you look from far away it's got an LTT logo in it
up your geek street cred on ltteststore.com today now to create the
perfect storm of bad audio we grabbed Anthony's GPU test bench and
replaced the perfectly good silverstone power supply with the sketchiest one we
had in the entire warehouse this 25
1000 watt china special you're actually going to see this again by the way
assuming it survives the day in our upcoming lemon pc build hit that
subscribe button so you don't miss out while we were at it we tossed in this
sapphire nitro plus Radeon rx 590 special edition for maximum coil
whininess even when this puppy's not doing anything
hear that crackling that ticking can you hear it a little bit yeah that's
it well it's not even doing anything david oh yeah all right let's start with a baseline
without our power filtering card in here pre-loaded on this machine i've got a
handful of lossless audio tracks ready to go and grado's 420 edition headphones
as our reference cans to start with
i really need to move to flack for all my stuff now what i'd really love to have is
something with sort of quiet parts of the track so let me uh
poke around a little bit here because that's where you're gonna be able to hear that that hiss or that higher noise
floor
while i'm listening i'm going to go ahead and run specuperf which is like a
professional applications benchmark that loads up both our CPU and GPU to see if
i hear any of that uh
delightful buzzing through my headphones here can you hear that wine now that
we've actually loaded it up yeah
i just i can't make out any problem here to be
clear these are not the most difficult headphones in the world to drive so it's
not a huge surprise to me that the onboard audio on this motherboard is
able to drive them just fine and i'm not saying that if you didn't have very
high-end audiophile headphones you might not need a better audio solution it's
just that that's not what we're testing for today today we just want to know if
this makes a difference in a setup that someone might normally actually use so
i don't know maybe i'm going to be blown away let's let's throw the power filter
card in and see how we do here something to note guys that we didn't actually
mention before is this can be installed either in a PCIe 1x slot or a 16x slot
so you can insert your placebo however you like
you just flip the bracket around and install it the other way where's my RGB
at oh it's set to white yeah that's more work than i think it's
worth to change i actually want to start with the simplest thing
just the test tone
and it's fine fire up spectrum perf i guess
yeah i mean i guess that's one thing that we can determine like if it helps with the coil
whine out of the GPU
it's horrible uh let's listen to those same tracks
again now
still a good song
yep wait rick astley made it onto this greatest
hit to the 80s collection but not with never going to give you up
what even is that i don't know so colin prepared this
video and he wrote it as though there was no difference
and i wanted to try real hard to find a difference that he didn't detect but
unfortunately i couldn't
not even in the coil whine of the system so
the question then is what made l fidelity think that this was
going to work is there any scientific basis whatsoever for why putting a pci
express card into an entirely different
slot would have any impact on the dc power quality of a graphics card that's
over here in another slot or a sound card that's built right into the
motherboard you can actually see it down at the bottom there well actually people have been putting
capacitors and inductors and power lines to smooth out noisy signals for a long
time now lc filters are a perfect example of this principle that are
commonly used in drones to improve video quality which can be degraded by the
electrical noise caused by the motors and the escs particularly when they're
rapidly changing speed so the principle is actually not stupid
the problem is that you're limited to just the things that this card can touch
meaning that there's no impact on the pci express connectors that are going
straight into your graphics card here and it also ignores that your sound card
even an onboard one like this already has this kind of filtering built
into it the thing is the youngsters out there might not
remember this but there was a time when on-board audio was so bad that a sound
card was a pretty integral part of any decent rig i can actually remember my
first sound blaster like it was yesterday it was an auto g2 zs and it
was it was night and day the difference was enough to put tears in your eyes
like listening to the same songs it was huge
so i'm not poo pooing the fundamental idea here
it's just that we're looking at yesterday's solution tomorrow
because for the most part those days are over and on board audio is good enough
for the vast majority of people but wait Linus you might say what about
coil wine if it doesn't oh oh that's funny well whatever we did this out of
order we already checked that it doesn't help with that it's horrible so
let's just conclude with this given that we used the noisiest parts
that we could find here in the studio and didn't perceive any difference
i wouldn't buy one of these instead i would suggest either investing in a
decent power filter or power bar for your entire system to eliminate ground
loops and other noise not to mention improve the longevity of your power
supply or if that isn't in the cards maybe go pick up a digital analog
converter that sits outside of the pc itself like one of these units from fio
by moving the signal processing out of the pc's case to an external dac and amp
you're isolating it from the internal noise of your system and yeah yes i know
some of it can still come through usb but there are options out there if
you're that paranoid to further reduce that potential crosstalk at the end of
the day bottom line is a power filter isn't the first thing you should try
when it comes to improving the quality of your sound and if you're running such
a bad motherboard that you're getting hissing and crackling from your
headphones or speakers i think your forty dollars would probably be better
spent on a better motherboard that also
improves the rest of your computing experience
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by the way if you guys enjoyed this video and you want to learn a little bit
more about this setup here we actually collabed on this video with dms he's a
smaller youtuber but he's super into this stuff and very knowledgeable so you
can check out the video we did with him and then maybe his channel