Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This should be illegal… PC Audio Product Scams”.
It’S a classic gamer blunder. You spend all your cash on silly things like performance and now you’re stuck with onboard audio, but fear not Gamers. For these cheap and easy to install power filters will isolate your harmonic interference, filter your high frequency Ripple and enhance your overall stability sounds great too great. How can How could a fako memory stick improve? All of that kind of makes me wonder: is this yet another audio product with marketing so deceptive it ought to be illegal.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder anymore. We have a lab, so we’re going to be finding out once and for all. Does l Fidelity know something I don’t? Are there power noise filters for PC Hi-Fi, the cheapest shortcut to Great audio, or are they yet another log shaped fish in the Cesspool of audiophile marketing? You know it isn’t. Log shaped our sponsor. Build Redux, build your dream.
Gaming rig with build Redux customize your build any way you want, then let build Redux do the heavy lifting all at a price competitive to building a PC yourself check out, build Redux at the link below in general. The goal when designing an audio device is to have the output, be as close to the original recording as possible. One user might prefer more bass, while another might like to enhance vocals through software Equalization, but the hardware should aim to avoid altering the character of the sound or adding any unnecessary noise. Of course, if you’ve ever used an onboard sound card, you probably know that these basic Solutions sometimes fall well short of that Mark.
Most onboard audio is decent these days, but I’ve personally encountered everything from slight background. This thing to loud ticking noises every time I move the mouse that is where these come in. These have all been opened for testing already, but this is my first close look at them.
We’Ve got a variety of different power supply power filters. This one right here is for SATA devices. It goes on the back of the drive like this okay and then you’ve just got your same SATA interface, you plug your power, cable and your data cable, but now filtered, oh, my God, David. I’M so glad you asked um, it doesn’t appear, so I can’t find any traces that are actually routed from here over here. Like look at this, these all just go straight up.
Oh you know what no these two go over here. The vast majority of them just go straight up to that pass-through, though that is hilarious. I actually am getting a headache just looking at this. This is really painful.
Yeah yeah, maybe I should be listening through L Fidelity. This one here is for three pin or four pin fans and Promises to improve Clarity and reduce noise, or is it to improve Clarity by reducing noise, we’re not sure um and neither it seems, are ill Fidelity. Their marketing is kind of all over the place. Most of the hardware we bought follows a pretty similar pattern, though you install it between some power source and some power using thing, and then it cleans it.
The reviews are pretty positive, though I don’t know whether the 10 orders is depressing or gives me hope. These are just obviously fake, good filter works, fine very good, improves, noise and speed. I believe it will prolong the life of hard drive. I promise you, it doesn’t make your hard drive faster and if it did, that would be a huge problem. These are Precision manufactured devices. You don’t want them to go faster or slower. I am a fan of this brand use.
The filters for ddr4, PCI, SATA and cooler in the system is more stable. I do not lose data if the power drops or oscillates. I hate it when my power oscillates. Finally, it is a mandatory item if you want to have a PC that lasts much longer, wow yeah, I always like more points of failure. When I want my PC to last much longer, the price to cost ratio is so good.
The price might be bad, the cost might be bad, but that ratio of price to cost it’s good. I was giving you guys a second for that to click in price. To cost ratio anyway, the sketchiest one of all has got to be the ddr4 module. So it’s a power filter that fits in a memory slot and while I can kind of see how you could Market power filtering on high draw devices as a benefit, maybe gpus or something I mean using capacitors and inductors, like the ones that are plastered all over.
These pcbs is a proven strategy for reducing signal noise by conditioning the power. It’S just that: how could adding a completely completely unnecessary piece of Hardware contribute to cleaning up power if we were never drawing the power in the first place? We don’t need to clean it up we’re going to get to this in more detail later, but for now, if you’re, looking at the rest of the stuff and thought those shiny and colorful doodads, all over them sure look familiar pat yourself on the back because they Actually come from the same company, what brung us this weird pcie card two years ago, which raises the question: if we’ve already debunked these guys, why are we looking at them again well, one because we evidently haven’t fully buried them? Yet not only are these products listed, but they are apparently selling well enough that they’re in stock and shipped immediately and two because we are finally armed with the equipment to show that they don’t help. Because I mean maybe last time I just had a tinier and I couldn’t tell the difference this time – we’ve got the tools, let’s get them installed for those wondering. Yes, this is our starforge PC.
I guess I’ll start with the ddr4 memory modules. I can’t believe how much stuff we bought from these guys. How much total did we spend wait? We haven’t even talked about pricing, yet these modules are 40 US dollars each David. I have an actual headache, [ Laughter ]. This is painful for me. Would it make more sense? Let me show you yeah, no you’re not option one memory, speed priority option two priority filtering effect.
Let’S just install the hard drive filters. I hate that people are buying this. I hope that people aren’t buying this, but the fact that these guys are still around all these years later still selling this stuff would indicate to me that someone is buying it. I don’t want this video to be about mocking people for buying this stuff. I want it to be about educating them. Okay, my hard drives are filtered okay fan filtering.
This is actually one where I could almost see how maybe possibly it could do something. Pwm, controlled Electronics, like fans, have been known to cause undesirable behavior, for example, in monitors DC backlighting is more desirable than pwm backlighting, because pwm can cause a flickering effect that can be more fatiguing. However, for a system fan, I have a very hard time believing that it would affect your onboard audio okay, actually before we fire the system up. I think it’s worth taking a closer look at these Ram filters.
They’Re a bit different from the other l-fit LED products. Instead of being covered in colorful, candy capacitors, we get a pair of these NEC token prodizers, which are basically high performance capacitors. The reason these particular chips surprised me so much is that I’ve seen them before on gpus, motherboards and perhaps most notoriously, on the PlayStation 3, where they are a known point of failure, as documented in its 259-page Forum discussion. That is actually still getting updates and replies.
Now, assuming that these are genuine, it makes me kind of question my assumptions here. If these were really just snake oil, why would they spend the money on premium components when they could just put little gems on top of generic ones? They aren’t even doing that typical audiophile thing where they charge an arm and a leg for this stuff, knowing that almost no one will buy it, it’s pretty reasonably priced ranging from 10 to about 40 US dollars. Unfortunately, they all also aren’t doing a useful audio file thing I mean I get it. How could anything be so brazenly and utter lie right, you’d think that with 11 different kinds of capacitors on eight different devices in the system, plus some inductors and rectifiers, it should all add up to some pretty good filtering right.
Look they’ve even got little indicator lights to show they’re working, but no, not even close. We ran our tests by recording an empty line in with and without the filters first at idle. Then, while stress testing, the system there’s another type of test known as a null test, but we had some trouble getting that set up in time for this video and besides, it doesn’t really matter because the evidence we have is damning enough already. Let’S have a listen together because I actually haven’t gotten to listen to it just yet. Let’S start with our control, these wave files are boosted by about 45 decibels, so my listening volume will be quite low, but I should still be able to hear it. Okay. Now I want to see no filter with stress tests. Now two L fidelities credit. There is something here for them to try and get rid of. It should be noted, though, that these files are boosted by about 45 decibels. So, even if these sounds do exist in your onboard audio output, it’s likely that you wouldn’t notice them day to day I’m going to go with the memory filter. First, oh my God.
I can tell just looking at the waveform that this is not better. People must need more filtering. Let’S try all the filters with stress what I mean. I thought at best, these wouldn’t do anything, but I also thought that at worst, they wouldn’t do anything.
How did they manage to make the performance worse? That is undeniably a more noticeable noise floor and, worse filtering performance, and that’s not even all, remember all those pretty capacitors we’re pretty sure that at least some of them are fake. These Rubicon caps on the SATA filter take a look at the printing quality on the label. Genuine Rubicon caps are much sharper, especially on the logo, and we can’t find a product sheet for any cap they make of this spec. That looks like this and the bad news keeps on coming on the listing for these filters on taobao. There are references to a Korean company called sotm, and if we pay them a quick visit, we find that what El Fidelity has done here is make a replica of their presumably equally pointless filters. Maybe we’ll do a follow-up looking at those guys that some are you kidding me they make a motherboard designed for audio. You know what maybe we’re not going to do a follow-up. Maybe we’re just not going to go there.
I think I’ve had enough snake oil for one day, the most complimentary thing that I can possibly say about. These, then, is that they mostly don’t cost you any performance with the filters installed. Your RAM and your hard drive speeds should be the same though it should be noted that the fan filters did appear to lower our fan speeds by a small amount. If these are junk, then, where does that leave Gamers? Who want an easy way to increase their sound quality? Well, it leaves them saving their cash for a little bit longer for something like a new pair of headphones, a desktop USB DAC an amp, a higher quality power supply, a power conditioner.
Maybe a quality Screwdriver from ltdstore.com that they can use to install all of those things, except maybe the headphones anyway. We’Re gon na have all that linked down below now. Admittedly, there’s a chance that the 850 watt EVGA G6, that we installed on this system is simply 2 too good to notice any additional filtering, but there are also only so many bones that we can throw to L Fidelity before they’ve got a full skeleton of excuses. Speaking of Bones, here’s a bone to our sponsor secret Lab secret lab Sleek, ergonomic high quality chairs are built to withstand the rigors of gaming or office work for long hours.
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