Personally I would always go for two smaller power supplies than one big one. I know size may be an issue, but there are advantages to a distributed system of smaller supplies. Firstly, if your power supply dies, there is less chance of every module being affected. This is unlikely with a Power One, but things do go wrong. Secondly, a higher rated supply, say 3A, will be quite happy to drive 3A into your whole system or just one module. So if you have one faulty module it will quite happily chuck 3A into it and possibly burn something out. Thirdly, you can more likely ensure that the +15V and -15V lines stay at that level if the power busses are shorter. Which they would be with a smaller system of multiple busses each driven from their own supply, compared to one large distributed buss driven from one supply. Also any noisy modules that you may have can get their own supply leaving the audio pathway to have a nice clean supply for itself. Fourthly, Power One supplies do latch up with less than their maximum rated load. This is a flaw with their design whereby one supply line powers up before the first so the other one switches off. I have a sneaky feeling that using two smaller supplies will actually get you more module count than one bigger one. In a nutshell it is probably better to use two MOTM supplies not one bigger one. Tony
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Re: [motm] Swapping Power Supplies
2005-08-26 by Oakley Sound
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