I brought this question over from the supercap DAC thread
Sure, Mark
but I'll bring this question & answer over to the supercapacitor PS thread, as I wanted to not confuse the two its already seen in audiomisc & following posts.
I not going to give away all the techniques I'm using but IMO opinion people focus on the wrong thing when they are trying to build better power supplies for audio. From what I've seen there is a focus on breaking the connection with mains AC & ground as the source of all the ills of power supplies. I also thought this when I started down the road of using battery power many years ago. My experience taught me that this is not the magic' of battery/supercap power & this isolation is only of importance if you have a ground loop which should be identified & addressed system wide, anyway. Floating PS supplies bring their own issues when used in mixed systems, anyway.
So people put a lot of time & effort & money into making batteries or supercapacitors into floating supplies (usually with a switch to defeat this isolation )
Inevitably this requires putting a voltage regulator on the output of the battery or supercap & this kills all the magic. Why? I'm not exactly sure but I suspect that it's due to the feedback used in most regulators & it's generation of dynamic instability/noise when in use?
So yes I avoid this & supply output power directly from supercaps exactly as I did when using batteries. The power which energises/charges the batteries/supercaps has zero influence on the sound when of a reasonable quality. This has been shown many times by people unplugging the PS from my battery powered devices while playing & hearing absolutely no difference. The same applies to supercaps although it powers down in a short time.
So, yes I use linear low noise regulators to charge the supercaps & balance the voltage across them - this regulates their output voltage & can deliver voltage directly from the supercaps. There are other parts to this picture that I'll keep to myself but the above is the crucial information as far as sound quality (power quality) is concerned.