it's a classic gamer blunder you spend all your cash on silly things like
performance and now you're stuck with
onboard audio but fear not Gamers for these cheap and
easy to install power filters will isolate your harmonic interference
filter your high frequency Ripple and
enhance your overall stability sounds
great too great how can
hmm How could a fako memory stick improve
all of that kind of makes me wonder is this yet another audio product with
marketing so deceptive it ought to be illegal fortunately we don't have to
wonder anymore we have a lab so we're going to be finding out once and for all
does l Fidelity know something I don't are there power noise filters for PC
Hi-Fi the cheapest shortcut to Great audio or are they yet another log shaped
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
close to the original recording as possible one user might prefer more bass
while another might like to enhance vocals through software Equalization but
the hardware should aim to avoid altering the character of the sound or
adding any unnecessary noise of course if you've ever used an onboard sound
card you probably know that these basic Solutions sometimes fall well short of
that Mark most onboard audio is decent these days but I've personally
encountered everything from slight background this thing to loud ticking
noises every time I move the mouse that is where these come in these have
all been opened for testing already but this is my first close look at them
we've got a variety of different power supply power filters this one right here
is for SATA devices it goes on the back of the drive like this
okay and then you've just got your same SATA
interface you plug your power cable and your data cable but now filtered
oh my God David I'm so glad you asked
um it doesn't appear so I can't find any
traces that are actually routed from here
over here like look at this
these all just go straight up oh you know what no these two go over
here the vast majority of them just go straight up to that pass-through though
that is hilarious I actually am getting a
headache just looking at this
this is really painful yeah yeah maybe I
should be listening through L Fidelity this one here is for three pin or four
pin fans and Promises to improve Clarity
and reduce noise or is it to improve
Clarity by reducing noise we're not sure
um and neither it seems are ill Fidelity their marketing is kind of all over the
place most of the hardware we bought follows a pretty similar pattern though
you install it between some power source and some power using thing and then it
cleans it the reviews are pretty positive though I don't know whether the
10 orders is depressing or gives me hope these are just obviously fake good
filter works fine very good improves noise and speed I believe it will
prolong the life of hard drive I promise you it doesn't make your hard drive
faster and if it did that would be a huge problem these are Precision
manufactured devices you don't want them to go faster or slower I am a fan of
this brand use the filters for ddr4 PCI SATA and
cooler in the system is more stable I do not lose data if the power drops or
oscillates I hate it when my power oscillates
finally it is a mandatory item if you want to have a PC that lasts much longer
wow yeah I always like more points of
failure when I want my PC to last much longer
the price to cost ratio is so good the price might be bad the cost might be bad
but that ratio of price to cost it's
good
I was giving you guys a second for that to click in price to cost ratio anyway
the sketchiest one of all has got to be
the ddr4 module so it's a power filter
that fits in a memory slot and while I
can kind of see how you could Market power filtering on high draw devices as
a benefit maybe gpus or something I mean
using capacitors and inductors like the ones that are plastered all over these
pcbs is a proven strategy for reducing
signal noise by conditioning the power it's just that how could adding a
completely completely unnecessary piece of Hardware contribute to cleaning up
power if we were never drawing the power in the first place we don't need to
clean it up we're going to get to this in more detail later but for now if you're
looking at the rest of the stuff and thought those shiny and colorful doodads all
over them sure look familiar pat yourself on the back because they
actually come from the same company what brung us this weird PCIe card two years
ago which raises the question if we've already debunked these guys why are we
looking at them again well one because we evidently haven't fully buried them
yet not only are these products listed but they are apparently selling well
enough that they're in stock and shipped immediately and two because we are
finally armed with the equipment to show that they don't help because I mean
maybe last time I just had a tinier and
I couldn't tell the difference this time we've got the tools let's get them
installed for those wondering yes this is our starforge PC I guess I'll start
with the ddr4 memory modules I can't believe how much stuff we bought from
these guys how much total did we spend wait we
haven't even talked about pricing yet these modules are 40 US dollars each
David I have an actual headache
this is painful for me would it make more sense
RAM safety filtered by one normal module I think we'll do hard let me show you
yeah no you're not option one memory
speed priority option two priority
filtering effect
let's just install the hard drive filters
I hate that people are buying this I hope that people aren't buying this but
the fact that these guys are still around all these years later still
selling this stuff would indicate to me that someone is buying it I don't want
this video to be about mocking people for buying this stuff I want it to be
about educating them okay my hard drives
are filtered okay fan filtering this is actually one where I could almost see
how maybe possibly it could do something pwm controlled Electronics like fans
have been known to cause undesirable behavior for example in monitors DC
backlighting is more desirable than pwm backlighting because pwm can cause a
flickering effect that can be more fatiguing however for a system fan I
have a very hard time believing that it would affect your onboard audio
okay actually before we fire the system up I
think it's worth taking a closer look at these RAM filters they're a bit
different from the other l-fit LED products instead of being covered in
colorful candy capacitors we get a pair of these NEC token prodizers which are
basically high performance capacitors the reason these particular chips
surprised me so much is that I've seen them before on gpus motherboards and
perhaps most notoriously on the PlayStation 3 where they are a known
point of failure as documented in its 259-page Forum discussion that is
actually still getting updates and replies now assuming that these are
genuine it makes me kind of question my assumptions here if these were really
just snake oil why would they spend the money on premium components when they
could just put little gems on top of generic ones they aren't even doing that
typical audiophile thing where they charge an ARM and a leg for this stuff
knowing that almost no one will buy it it's pretty reasonably priced ranging
from 10 to about 40 US dollars Unfortunately they all also aren't doing
a useful audio file thing I mean
I get it how could anything be so
brazenly and utter lie right you'd think
that with 11 different kinds of capacitors on eight different devices in
the system plus some inductors and rectifiers it should all add up to some
pretty good filtering right look they've even got little indicator lights to show
they're working but no not even close we ran our tests
by recording an empty line in with and without the filters first at idle then
while stress testing the system there's another type of test known as a null
test but we had some trouble getting that set up in time for this video and
besides it doesn't really matter because the evidence we have is damning enough
already let's have a listen together because I actually haven't gotten to
listen to it just yet let's start with our control these wave files are boosted
by about 45 decibels so my listening volume will be quite low but I should
still be able to hear it okay
now I want to see no filter with stress
tests now
two L fidelities credit there is something here for them to try and get
rid of it should be noted though that these files are boosted by about 45
decibels so even if these sounds do
exist in your onboard audio output it's likely that you wouldn't notice them day
to day I'm going to go with the memory filter first
oh my God I can tell just looking at the waveform that this is not better
people must need more filtering let's try all
the filters with stress
what
I mean I thought at best these wouldn't
do anything but I also thought that at worst they
wouldn't do anything how did they manage to make the
performance worse
that is undeniably a more noticeable
noise floor and worse filtering performance and that's not even all
remember all those pretty capacitors we're pretty sure that at least some of
them are fake these Rubicon caps on the SATA filter
take a look at the printing quality on the label genuine Rubicon caps are much
sharper especially on the logo and we can't find a product sheet for any cap
they make of this spec that looks like this
and the bad news keeps on coming on the listing for these filters on taobao
there are references to a Korean company called sotm and if we pay them a quick
visit we find that what El Fidelity has done here is make a replica of their
presumably equally pointless filters maybe we'll do a follow-up looking at
those guys that some are you kidding me they make a motherboard designed for
audio you know what maybe we're not going to
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
complimentary thing that I can possibly say about these then is that they mostly
don't cost you any performance with the
filters installed your RAM and your hard drive speeds should be the same though
it should be noted that the fan filters did appear to lower our fan speeds by a
small amount if these are junk then where does that leave Gamers who want an
easy way to increase their sound quality well it leaves them saving their cash
for a little bit longer for something like a new pair of headphones a desktop
USB DAC an amp a higher quality power
supply a power conditioner maybe a quality Screwdriver from ltdstore.com
that they can use to install all of those things except maybe the headphones
anyway we're gonna have all that linked down below now admittedly there's a
chance that the 850 watt EVGA G6 that we
installed on this system is simply 2 too good to notice any additional filtering
but there are also only so many bones that we can throw to L Fidelity before
they've got a full skeleton of excuses speaking of Bones here's a bone to our
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secret lab today if you guys enjoyed this beat down
you'll probably also like the time we took a look at an audiophile network
switch equally ineffective at improving audio quality but four times the cost
actually at the network switch at least didn't make audio quality worse