PSU & Cover...

[f1eng]

Manoet - way to go with another cool project to follow along with interest.  I encountered the same blue tack like pads while going through my D200 and power supply enclosure.  Sorry, I'm not talented at identifying the variety of electrical semiconductors outside of ID'ing the DAC and DSP chips.  I was looking for rectifiers to see what caliber they might be as another possible upgrade if not a hexfred grade.  Way too many small components and efficient use of space on those circuit boards for my comfort level of swapping more parts out.

On a related note, can anyone provide info regarding how hot is too hot (or ideal) for our Devialets? 

Reading about all the firmware updates & disappointing issues the past 6 months, I elected to not update until this weekend.  I made the full updates and was anticipating a slightly cooler running temperatures from reading about an improved power management enhancement.  After playing music a few hours my display showed the following temperatures;

A amp 55 *C

D amp 46*C

Supply 51*C

After this running time, the outside top cover is so hot it is barely reasonable to leave a hand on it.  This just seems intuitively too hot from my perspective and sparked my interest from reading this thread.  

As a side note, during the firmware & configuration updates, I also reduced the power output watts from the max. 200 watts down to 80 watts.  I've experienced the issue where the sound quality seems to suffer at lower volume levels and it was suggested that it may be improved by reducing the power output.  In the brief few hours of listening to the changes, it does seem to have improved the lower volume sensitivity SQ.  This also makes me wonder if the amplifier is working harder at 80 watts to drive my speaker and may be contributing to the hot running temperature.

Thx
Kenreau

PMFJI but that is very hot for 8.1.3 using power management.
The principle route for evacuating heat from the circuitry of a Devialet is via thermally conductive pads to the baseplate. If you have removed the baseplate of your amp for any reason and not carefully bedded the thermal pad back onto the baseplate when refitting that would be the most likely explanation for this problem IME.
It is pointless cooling the top, since it is not in thermal contact with anything of consequence.

I get 36/34/39 on 8.1.3 on my 800 listening loud.