WEBVTT

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it's a classic gamer blunder you spend all your cash on silly things like

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performance and now you're stuck with

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onboard audio but fear not Gamers for these cheap and

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easy to install power filters will isolate your harmonic interference

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filter your high frequency Ripple and

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enhance your overall stability sounds

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great too great how can

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hmm How could a fako memory stick improve

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all of that kind of makes me wonder is this yet another audio product with

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marketing so deceptive it ought to be illegal fortunately we don't have to

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wonder anymore we have a lab so we're going to be finding out once and for all

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does l Fidelity know something I don't are there power noise filters for PC

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Hi-Fi the cheapest shortcut to Great audio or are they yet another log shaped

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fish in the Cesspool of audiophile marketing you know it isn't log shaped our sponsor

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in general the goal when designing an audio device is to have the output be as

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close to the original recording as possible one user might prefer more bass

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while another might like to enhance vocals through software Equalization but

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the hardware should aim to avoid altering the character of the sound or

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adding any unnecessary noise of course if you've ever used an onboard sound

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card you probably know that these basic Solutions sometimes fall well short of

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that Mark most onboard audio is decent these days but I've personally

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encountered everything from slight background this thing to loud ticking

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noises every time I move the mouse that is where these come in these have

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all been opened for testing already but this is my first close look at them

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we've got a variety of different power supply power filters this one right here

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is for SATA devices it goes on the back of the drive like this

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okay and then you've just got your same SATA

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interface you plug your power cable and your data cable but now filtered

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oh my God David I'm so glad you asked

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um it doesn't appear so I can't find any

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traces that are actually routed from here

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over here like look at this

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these all just go straight up oh you know what no these two go over

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here the vast majority of them just go straight up to that pass-through though

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that is hilarious I actually am getting a

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headache just looking at this

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this is really painful yeah yeah maybe I

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should be listening through L Fidelity this one here is for three pin or four

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pin fans and Promises to improve Clarity

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and reduce noise or is it to improve

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Clarity by reducing noise we're not sure

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um and neither it seems are ill Fidelity their marketing is kind of all over the

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place most of the hardware we bought follows a pretty similar pattern though

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you install it between some power source and some power using thing and then it

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cleans it the reviews are pretty positive though I don't know whether the

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10 orders is depressing or gives me hope these are just obviously fake good

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filter works fine very good improves noise and speed I believe it will

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prolong the life of hard drive I promise you it doesn't make your hard drive

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faster and if it did that would be a huge problem these are Precision

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manufactured devices you don't want them to go faster or slower I am a fan of

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this brand use the filters for ddr4 PCI SATA and

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cooler in the system is more stable I do not lose data if the power drops or

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oscillates I hate it when my power oscillates

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finally it is a mandatory item if you want to have a PC that lasts much longer

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wow yeah I always like more points of

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failure when I want my PC to last much longer

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the price to cost ratio is so good the price might be bad the cost might be bad

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but that ratio of price to cost it's

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good

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I was giving you guys a second for that to click in price to cost ratio anyway

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the sketchiest one of all has got to be

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the ddr4 module so it's a power filter

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that fits in a memory slot and while I

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can kind of see how you could Market power filtering on high draw devices as

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a benefit maybe gpus or something I mean

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using capacitors and inductors like the ones that are plastered all over these

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pcbs is a proven strategy for reducing

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signal noise by conditioning the power it's just that how could adding a

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completely completely unnecessary piece of Hardware contribute to cleaning up

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power if we were never drawing the power in the first place we don't need to

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clean it up we're going to get to this in more detail later but for now if you're

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looking at the rest of the stuff and thought those shiny and colorful doodads all

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over them sure look familiar pat yourself on the back because they

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actually come from the same company what brung us this weird PCIe card two years

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ago which raises the question if we've already debunked these guys why are we

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looking at them again well one because we evidently haven't fully buried them

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yet not only are these products listed but they are apparently selling well

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enough that they're in stock and shipped immediately and two because we are

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finally armed with the equipment to show that they don't help because I mean

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maybe last time I just had a tinier and

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I couldn't tell the difference this time we've got the tools let's get them

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installed for those wondering yes this is our starforge PC I guess I'll start

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with the ddr4 memory modules I can't believe how much stuff we bought from

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these guys how much total did we spend wait we

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haven't even talked about pricing yet these modules are 40 US dollars each

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David I have an actual headache

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this is painful for me would it make more sense

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RAM safety filtered by one normal module I think we'll do hard let me show you

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yeah no you're not option one memory

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speed priority option two priority

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filtering effect

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let's just install the hard drive filters

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I hate that people are buying this I hope that people aren't buying this but

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the fact that these guys are still around all these years later still

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selling this stuff would indicate to me that someone is buying it I don't want

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this video to be about mocking people for buying this stuff I want it to be

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about educating them okay my hard drives

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are filtered okay fan filtering this is actually one where I could almost see

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how maybe possibly it could do something pwm controlled Electronics like fans

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have been known to cause undesirable behavior for example in monitors DC

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backlighting is more desirable than pwm backlighting because pwm can cause a

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flickering effect that can be more fatiguing however for a system fan I

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have a very hard time believing that it would affect your onboard audio

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okay actually before we fire the system up I

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think it's worth taking a closer look at these RAM filters they're a bit

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different from the other l-fit LED products instead of being covered in

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colorful candy capacitors we get a pair of these NEC token prodizers which are

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basically high performance capacitors the reason these particular chips

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surprised me so much is that I've seen them before on gpus motherboards and

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perhaps most notoriously on the PlayStation 3 where they are a known

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point of failure as documented in its 259-page Forum discussion that is

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actually still getting updates and replies now assuming that these are

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genuine it makes me kind of question my assumptions here if these were really

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just snake oil why would they spend the money on premium components when they

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could just put little gems on top of generic ones they aren't even doing that

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typical audiophile thing where they charge an ARM and a leg for this stuff

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knowing that almost no one will buy it it's pretty reasonably priced ranging

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from 10 to about 40 US dollars Unfortunately they all also aren't doing

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a useful audio file thing I mean

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I get it how could anything be so

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brazenly and utter lie right you'd think

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that with 11 different kinds of capacitors on eight different devices in

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the system plus some inductors and rectifiers it should all add up to some

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pretty good filtering right look they've even got little indicator lights to show

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they're working but no not even close we ran our tests

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by recording an empty line in with and without the filters first at idle then

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while stress testing the system there's another type of test known as a null

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test but we had some trouble getting that set up in time for this video and

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besides it doesn't really matter because the evidence we have is damning enough

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already let's have a listen together because I actually haven't gotten to

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listen to it just yet let's start with our control these wave files are boosted

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by about 45 decibels so my listening volume will be quite low but I should

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still be able to hear it okay

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now I want to see no filter with stress

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tests now

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two L fidelities credit there is something here for them to try and get

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rid of it should be noted though that these files are boosted by about 45

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decibels so even if these sounds do

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exist in your onboard audio output it's likely that you wouldn't notice them day

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to day I'm going to go with the memory filter first

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oh my God I can tell just looking at the waveform that this is not better

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people must need more filtering let's try all

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the filters with stress

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what

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I mean I thought at best these wouldn't

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do anything but I also thought that at worst they

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wouldn't do anything how did they manage to make the

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performance worse

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that is undeniably a more noticeable

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noise floor and worse filtering performance and that's not even all

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remember all those pretty capacitors we're pretty sure that at least some of

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them are fake these Rubicon caps on the SATA filter

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take a look at the printing quality on the label genuine Rubicon caps are much

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sharper especially on the logo and we can't find a product sheet for any cap

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they make of this spec that looks like this

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and the bad news keeps on coming on the listing for these filters on taobao

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there are references to a Korean company called sotm and if we pay them a quick

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visit we find that what El Fidelity has done here is make a replica of their

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presumably equally pointless filters maybe we'll do a follow-up looking at

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those guys that some are you kidding me they make a motherboard designed for

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audio you know what maybe we're not going to

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do a follow-up maybe we're just not going to go there I think I've had enough snake oil for one day the most

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complimentary thing that I can possibly say about these then is that they mostly

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don't cost you any performance with the

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filters installed your RAM and your hard drive speeds should be the same though

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it should be noted that the fan filters did appear to lower our fan speeds by a

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small amount if these are junk then where does that leave Gamers who want an

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easy way to increase their sound quality well it leaves them saving their cash

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for a little bit longer for something like a new pair of headphones a desktop

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USB DAC an amp a higher quality power

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supply a power conditioner maybe a quality Screwdriver from ltdstore.com

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that they can use to install all of those things except maybe the headphones

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anyway we're gonna have all that linked down below now admittedly there's a

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chance that the 850 watt EVGA G6 that we

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installed on this system is simply 2 too good to notice any additional filtering

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but there are also only so many bones that we can throw to L Fidelity before

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they've got a full skeleton of excuses speaking of Bones here's a bone to our

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00:13:56.880 --> 00:14:03.540
you'll probably also like the time we took a look at an audiophile network

00:14:00.779 --> 00:14:07.680
switch equally ineffective at improving audio quality but four times the cost

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actually at the network switch at least didn't make audio quality worse