The lucky lady was out to lunch. HEM's 2.1 and 2.5mm DC terminations were misfits. For the Cambridge dock, the central opening was too narrow. For the ProJect, the entire plug was too fat. After all, I didn't have to commit reviewer idiocy which no paying customer would ever attempt. Thanks Jane! Onward and up with Ivette's Midi 120. Sitting on her work desk 2.5m from this wall, I now managed to get Hypsos to show 2-5 watts. Playback volumes were higher. It was interesting to watch how bass transients would momentarily increase output power. Real time displayed how that range is most power hungry.
Getting hypsie now made at least as high of a jump as it had on my mellower desk but probably higher. The gains in clarity and gush were impossible to miss. Given how modest a source—underestimate quality .aiff files sent S/PDIF to this speaker's DAC at your own peril—Ms. Austin might still invite herself. Truth told, tell her to stay in the 19th century. It's only when you lack personal experience that adding Hypsos to this simple system appears top heavy aka typical misguided audiophile overkill. Once you hear it then face withdrawal, you'll quickly call it essential then pick a fight with the pick-up courier. This segues back on my opening gambit. In this application, Hypsos didn't just drive a small phonostage or DAC. It influenced DAC + DSP engine + power electronics. These combined benefits were very obvious.
King of PSU upgrades? Like HighFidelity.pl's editor, I'm aware of no direct competitor. That means knowing of nothing as powerful and variable. That it costs according becomes lopsided only when it's strapped to a $299 Wyred4Sound µLink USB/S-PDIF type. Once we elevate our game to a €2'400 Mytek Brooklyn Bridge type as I did with Fram's Midi 120, the scales of balance reset. Now all makes sense and perfectly so. That's the lone proviso. Whilst Ferrum's Hypsos is astonishingly universal re: all the kit it could power, it becomes realistic only north of a certain investment into its load. In the real world of not just specs, that's the limit on actual universality. Where exactly that transitions is down to each buyer. I do think that most would probably want their main component to be at least equally priced to feel good. But just for a thought experiment, once we separate a single-box component into its signal-path and power-supply halves, which half really is primary, which secondary? We'd make no sound without either. Yet upgrade a component with a stablemate one or two tiers higher. The likelihood is that what scales up most is its power supply. Hello Hypsos.
Only someone omniscient should be a kingmaker. That's not me. As a German, it'd also be Kaiser not king. But from the little I do know, Ferrum's Hypsos is at least a prince among add-on power supplies. It's a very smart 21st-century piece of kit that deserves to sit at the top of any check-it-out list that shops to upgrade an existing component's DC wall wart or brick. That's not raining on SMPS in general. We're singling out generic jobs where the makers of the component couldn't afford anything better. When seriously better costs €995 as it does today, you see why they couldn't.
By the same token, you also see why you really should endeavor to as soon as you can.
From the Greek, "hypsos is a philosophical concept comparable to the modern concept of the sublime; or a moment that brings oral speech to an astonishing and monumental pause. Its root hypso literally means 'aloft', 'height' or 'on 'high'."
What the Greeks said!
