MATT NEWPORT: Here we have an unmodified 002 and modified 002. There's quite a few differences. One is the addition of this linear power supply here with filtration caps. And the reason that we add this is not only to increase the headroom of these analog stages here but also this particular power supply that they're traditionally powered from is fairly noisy. As we come up here into the supply board, we use a little bit of brute force filtering to get rid of some oscillations on the digital rail, and these are real nice capacitor intended for computer application at extremely low impedance, and they're really good for audio work.

Now typically with these, if we add the power supply, we don’t really mess with this. But if we don't add the power supply to these, we actually RF shield these cables with a foil and this reduces stray noise with the tendency to get picked up here and here in these sections, and if you've ever turned on your 002 and armed it along like 5 & 6 and 7 & 8, they have this kind of like whiny noise, and that's what that is.

Over here we've got the D-to-A section, and again we do a decoupling here. We're trying to isolate the capacitors from any sort of or isolate the converters from any sort of noise that the power supply puts out, and this helps improve low-level resolution. So okay, we have the D-to-A section here, and we've got decoupling using the same -- this is a Sanyo organic semiconductor capacitor, and it helps reduce or eliminate noise from the power supply and helps it to achieve closer to its ideal bit depth in terms of resolution.

So, and we change out the analog stages. The mic preamps here and then the voltage reference stages here. So here's the original. The way that the converter circuit is set up is actually not really even - most systems don't even use this. They use a little bit better configuration than this. And the same with A-to-D stages, the A-to-D converters here. Same thing, it tends to give a bit of a hazy undefined sound to the converters because they're basically what's happening is that there's so much noise in the power supply rail and it's feeding into each converter and coupling over into the converted digital data.