[jimtranr]

Originally Posted by Puma Cat

Hey Jim!
In my experience with the Venom 14 Digital power cords, Jim, the answer is YES. The power supply for my Sonore OpticalModule is a "brick type" SMPS of the type you describe for your Windows laptop: AC power cord to the SMPS "brick", then an attached DC cable emanating from the brick to the device....

Venom 14 Digital was specifically designed for just this type of application, and it works quite well in this regard.

Thanks, Stephen. That helps.

Additionally, if you want to do a further tweak that will really help things, get a female DC barrel plug with screw terminals on the back (you can find these on Amazon), attach a wire from negative screw terminal to an AC plug's ground prong (of the type shown). Plug into the same AC power strip as your laptop, and plug the DC end into your laptop's DC barrel port and your power cable into the back of this female barrel plug.

What this will do is shunt the very nasty high-impedance AC leakage currents from your SMPS that cause all sorts of insidious problems, including adding jitter, timing errors, and clock phase noise to your system. The improvement this will make is quite audible, so it is well-worth doing. If you need specifics on how to make this ground strap up, feel free to PM me.

And thanks for this. As it happens, following a discussion some time ago with Alex Crespi on a static-charge issue, I picked up one of those three-prong-plug ground cables. So I may give the barrel-plug tweak a shot.