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MCRU and Longdog Audio are relative newcomers to the hi-fi industry, both businesses have only been going for 3-4 years, in that time however they have managed to carve a niche in the industry with their regulated linear power supply’s which are designed and built by Nick Gorham who owns Longdog Audio. MCRU are the appointed agent for all Longdogs products. With a plethora of new hi-fi equipment being launched monthly, and the growing pc audio market which is vast, more and more components are designed using switch mode power supplies (smps) to power them, these are small and efficient but are well proven to inject noise into the mains supply, often robbing the music of vitality and life. Longdogs range of power supply’s have won numerous awards in the hi-fi press and the very first one to power the now dis-continued squeezebox touch is still selling, it was awarded a 5 start recommended badge by hi-fi choice magazine, here is the review.
Nick Gorham has developed a fully regulated linear power supply to address this problem and effectively replace the supplied smps with your equipment, examples of items supplied with a smps are Chord QuteHD DAC, Arcam IR-DAC, DSpeaker DAC, Muscal Fidelity V-DAC, many headphone amplifiers and some routers also use a smps and have been improved using a linear design.
Longdog Audio have now developed a power supply rated up to 5 amps which is aimed at music servers, NAS drives and other equipment that still use a smps but a more substantial offering to the 0.5-1 amp versions mentioned earlier for DACS. The subject of this article is the new fully regulated linear supply designed especially to use with the Naim Unitiserve.
The Unitiserve is a very popular hard disk music player which stores music files on an internal hard drive, 1000’s of cd quality files can be stored inside the unit ready to play back though your hi-fi system. Whilst the Unitiserve sounds very good it can sound better, the LDA power supply replaces the existing Naim supplied power brick to deliver a cleaner, quieter and more stable supply of mains voltage, in this case 12V DC at up to 4.8 amps. Initial trials of the power supply are very positive indeed with users reporting a definite sound quality improvement using the linear design.
The unit is destined to become a firm favourite of the Naim community, it is roughly the same size as Naim units and of course has the obligatory green LED on the front panel. If you want the very best sound quality from your Unitiserve please visit the MCRU website now to place your order.
