A little help from the ASR electronics Experts with my outdoor hifi setup?

[Destination: Moon]

Hi,

We love listening to music in outdoor settings (recent pic attached). I recently bought a Ecoflow River 3 Plus which is supposed to be a UPS capable pure sine wave powersupply.
But it seems to be givnig our SMSL DA-9 problems. It will run for about 5 minutes and then one channel or the other, never both at the same time will cut out for a fraction of a second.
It'll then continue on for 30 seconds or a couple minutes and do it again. Each channel will momentarily stop, but only one at a time very erratically.
I set it up in the house thinking it might be the cold but the same thing happened. Plugged into the house AC it runs like it should.

Any idea what may be happening? Is there a way to fix this or condition the power? Would a different small DAC/Amp combo work better?

Any suggestions appreciated!

Speakers are Affordable Accuracy from Mr. Dennis Murphy

 

[Todd k]

BRRRRR. I bet it has something to do with the cold ass air temp. That is some dedication to set up tunes on the tundra. I like your spirit. Unfortunately I don’t have a clue about your intermittent cut out. Sorry I couldn’t help but I bet someone here can. Good luck artic rocker.

 

[JeffS7444]

Hi,

We love listening to music in outdoor settings (recent pic attached). I recently bought a Ecoflow River 3 Plus which is supposed to be a UPS capable pure sine wave powersupply.
But it seems to be givnig our SMSL DA-9 problems. It will run for about 5 minutes and then one channel or the other, never both at the same time will cut out for a fraction of a second.
It'll then continue on for 30 seconds or a couple minutes and do it again. Each channel will momentarily stop, but only one at a time very erratically.
I set it up in the house thinking it might be the cold but the same thing happened. Plugged into the house AC it runs like it should.

Any idea what may be happening? Is there a way to fix this or condition the power? Would a different small DAC/Amp combo work better?

Any suggestions appreciated!

Speakers are Affordable Accuracy from Mr. Dennis Murphy

Electrical interference can cause DACs to glitch: Try locating the SMSL further away from the UPS and see if that helps.

 

[TobyJ]

See if you can work out what set up these guys are using for their arctic DJ set:

 

[Destination: Moon]

Thanks for the suggestions! I did relocate the amp while we were listening and again when I tried it inside our (heated ) home. No luck.
Something about the power its sending is not playing well with the Amp. Additional help is welcome - thanks!

 

[Keith_W]

To be honest, any of your electronics could be playing up in the cold. Why don't you try setting up the entire system in your house, including the UPS (don't run it on mains power), and see what happens? If it works inside the house but not outside, then something in your system does not like the cold.

 

[kyuu]

I would also guess it's either just too cold for proper operation or the Ecoflow is putting out some EM/RF interference that is causing the DAC some distress.

 

[digitalfrost]

So that brings us to the question....which hardware can operate in the cold? Or...would it make sense to build a heated box for the electronics?

 

[Destination: Moon]

I would also guess it's either just too cold for proper operation or the Ecoflow is putting out some EM/RF interference that is causing the DAC some distress.

View attachment 436029View attachment 436030

I did set it up in the house. Same Issue. And outside that day it was 45 degrees F. Not as cold as it looked but not room temp either. But still, it seems to be related to the PS

 

[Destination: Moon]

So figuring that its an insurmountable issue with the Ecoflow, I purchased a Ayimia A08 Pro. It has an external PS. Any thoughts on an external switching PS will better
tolerate an Inverter power supply? I can also power this amp with 24v directly from a 25V LiFePO4 battery that I already own. Is there any downside
or possible harm connecting the amp to this battery? The battery can easily supply 50+ amps at 25v

 

[TobyJ]

So figuring that its an insurmountable issue with the Ecoflow, I purchased a Ayimia A08 Pro. It has an external PS. Any thoughts on an external switching PS will better
tolerate an Inverter power supply? I can also power this amp with 24v directly from a 25V LiFePO4 battery that I already own. Is there any downside
or possible harm connecting the amp to this battery? The battery can easily supply 50+ amps at 25v

In my experience (important caveat - I have zero technical knowledge), powering an amp directly from a Direct Current source makes the whole set up much more efficient. When I switched to powering an outside amp and speakers from a DC source, the power would last 10x as long as when the chain was battery > inverter > amp power supply > amp.

 

[boXem]

Semiconductors are supposed to work better in cold environment.
Issues that I have seen with cold are more related to passive components whose values become outside the design boundaries.

 

[Destination: Moon]

In my experience (important caveat - I have zero technical knowledge), powering an amp directly from a Direct Current source makes the whole set up much more efficient. When I switched to powering an outside amp and speakers from a DC source, the power would last 10x as long as when the chain was battery > inverter > amp power supply > amp.

Watching the watt meter on the ecoflow, even with the inverter it was surprising how little energy is needed to drive the class D amp even at pretty loud volumes.
It never went over 10w and was usually much lower. Makes me wonder what all the fuss is about when people seem to need or want 100 watts a channel or more.
There is no way I could be in a room with speakers being driven at even 30 watts, never mind 100

 

[NTK]

Watching the watt meter on the ecoflow, even with the inverter it was surprising how little energy is needed to drive the class D amp even at pretty loud volumes.
It never went over 10w and was usually much lower. Makes me wonder what all the fuss is about when people seem to need or want 100 watts a channel or more.
There is no way I could be in a room with speakers being driven at even 30 watts, never mind 100

The high power output capability is for handling the signal peaks. It will depending on what type of music you listen to. For example: Well recorded orchestral music can have a peak-power-to-average-power ratio of over 100x. Highly compressed pop, not so much.