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Beneath the extruded aircraft-grade aluminium chassis is serious hardcore technology:
The iPower Elite has:
Expensive equipment typically ship with generic power supplies. This is like putting supermarket fuel in a Ferrari. It deserves the best but isn’t getting it.
The generic SMPS power supply (PS) is very noisy. Many upgraded audiophile linear PS are better, but still have huge noise at the rectification frequencies and at multiples 50Hz, 100Hz, 150Hz (or 60, 120, 180 for 60Hz countries) etc.
The iPower Elite was designed to deliver the smooth and silent power. It gives your streamer/DAC/amplifier all the silent, clean power of a battery with none of the hassle.
Based on military tech, our improved Active Noise Cancellation II® actively cancels all incoming noise.
It does this in a similar way to active noise-cancelling headphones – it generates a signal identical to that of the incoming electrical noise but in the opposite phase, actively cancelling it out. This is highly effective at removing low- and mid-frequency noise, while passive insulating filters deal with higher frequency interference. This combination is measurably more effective at eradicating noise corrupting the USB signal than devices relying solely on passive filtering
It works with virtually any DC powered device and comes in 5, 12, 15 and 24 volts.
I was a little apprehensive buying this given the power requirements of the NUC (12-19v, 65w) and did have a couple issues at first with it being overdrawn, causing the NUC to power off. However, it turns out the issue was with the cheap, Chinese LPS I was using for the Matrix X-SPDIF 2 interface that my NUC feeds into. When the LPS would drop voltage, it would cause the X-SPDIF 2 to power off momentarily and then kick back on after starting to draw power from the NUC, which also has an external 2TB, USB-powered SSD attached.
Once the LPS was replaced on the X-SPDIF (with a 5v variant of this iFi iPower Elite), any problems with insufficient power disappeared.
If you have a lot of devices attached to your NUC, this may not work for you, but if not, I can't recommend it enough. But check the power requirements of your NUC to be sure! The 10 series uses a much weaker GPU that has lower power requirements than the 8 series.
The changes the iPower Elite made were large and immediately noticeable. Most notably, noise floor dropped dramatically, making microdetails far more audible. Dynamics are also improved and bass slam/impact has more force behind it. The stage widened and deepened substantially with a much greater 3D presentation, providing much better separation between layers/instruments. I'm excited to hear how the sound continues to improve as both the iPower Elite and the iFi Nova cable bought to pair with it continue to break in. For anyone on the fence still: my wife noticed immediately that sound had changed for the better and I never mentioned that I changed anything.
Thanks to Andrew and the rest of the Bloom Audio team for answering my questions and getting this shipped so quickly!