Going to bat

Bakoon used to make the BPS-02 power supply wherein two battery banks auto-cycled to charge one whilst the other played for continuous decoupled play. With far higher voltages, Vinnie Rossi's original LIO integrated amplifier followed the same auto-cycling path with supercaps. Serge Schmidlin of Switzerland's Audio Consulting remains a fan of battery power. On a far grander scale, so does Kevin Scott of the UK's Living Voice. He runs their entire Definitive Audio demo system off a custom battery array and for years duplicated that exact system at Munich's HighEnd show. For a commercial DC source of similarly grand appetites, there is Berlin's Stromtank. With EAhibrid's focus on low-draw source components meanwhile, we restrict our appetite to a much smaller serving. Eat less, live longer? They're a small Taiwanese firm focused on reducing electrical and network-related noise that remains in play even when data transmission itself is bit-perfect. Their PureDC-B1 is a battery-powered DC supply for routers, switches, streamers, servers and DACs whilst the CyberFilter EAL-1000/EAL-2000 is a passive Ethernet filter combining galvanic isolation, common-mode filtering and proprietary AWR circuitry. The PureDC-B1 lowers noise that enters the network chain from the power side. The Cyber Filter addresses noise travelling through the Ethernet connection itself. A quick peruse of the brand's Taiwanese home page shows that for this product founder Paul Huang collaborated with California's EnigmAcoustics—hence the EA in his brand name—as well as Germany's R.Neumann Design and Taiwan's Hi-Pro Technology whilst exploiting Tesla's 2170 lithium battery tech. His battery supply comes in output ratings of 5V+9V/12V, 12V/15V, 19V/24V or 5V/3A + 5V/1A. The passive inline Ethernet filter offers copper or silver-plated variants at different lengths starting at 1.25m terminated with Telegärtner plugs as shown.

His most popular 9/12V PSU rates for a high 5/10A continuous/peak from four series-connected 2170 cells. The Tesla 2170 is a cylindrical lithium-ion battery of 21mm diameter and 70mm length, hence its name. The Tesla Model 3 Short Range car runs 2'976 of these, the Long Range 4'416. The energy density of this battery is >800Wh/l (watt-hours per litre). At a nominal voltage of 3.7V, each cell can be charged as high as 4.2V and discharged as low as 2.5V, storing up to 5'000mAh. Four series-connected 2170 can produce a nominal 14.4-14.8V with a maximum of 16.8V fully charged. The parallel 5V port supplies the standard 1/1.5A c./p. Pure Play Mode is exactly what the name suggests: with EAhibrid's 16.8V wall-wart charger internally decoupled. As the left LED goes from blue to green and finally red, it tracks battery capacity. Once it falls below 20% for red, the device cuts off its power feed. Meanwhile Unlimited Play Mode plays whilst we charge. The latter confirms with the second orange LED. Now "a special buffer and isolation design" keeps AC noise at bay. As to what goes on inside the aluminium-enclosed Ethernet filter, mentioned are a quad of OCC-wired isolation transformers, a quad of common-mode filters, another cap/coil-based noise filter, then "advanced waveform restoration circuitry based on digital distortion reduction that uses stable digital signal-voltage tech modified from industrial server and ICT equipment". Connecting the bits is directionality-tested 22-gauge wiring and silver solder. If you're interesting in going to bat.tery on your source gear with DC inputs; and/or tackling UHF network noise passively to require no extra AC cabling—EAhibrid of Taiwan could just have you covered. European buyers have a distributor in Austria to fulfill orders within the trade union.