When I became a college student in 1989, I lived in Crown College, atop the UC Santa Cruz campus, nestled at the edge of a forest. On Friday and Saturday nights, a small handful of dormies would walk through the parking lot, past the Crown-Merrill apartments, and across East Road. From there, trails and fire paths went into the forest.

Armed with flashlights, we would come to breaks or small clearings amongst the trees and foliage. Any available moonlight was of enormous aid, in helping us to see.

While gathered in these clearings, we lamented not being able to have a campfire. In lieu of that, we had to pretend that our flashlights were campfires. We liked to joke and tell tall tales. We really got to know each other better, when we played Truth Or Dare. Some kids liked to drink beer, smoke marijuana, and do shrooms. But then there were those who liked to disrobe, and run around in various states of nakedness.

Sigh, you always had a few kids shining their flashlights on streaking bodies. I think the coed above was Rachel. She liked to do a belly dance, toss off her clothes, and howl at the moon.

Which brings us to the Simaudio MOON Evolution 820S power supply. Yeah, as the batteries in our flashlights drained, we college kids wished we had a generator in the forest clearings. Back in the dorms, none of us gave a damn about outboard power supplies. For me as an audiophile, the only outboard power supplies I really knew about were from Audio Alchemy and Naim. Be careful; in its shipping box, the 820S tips the scales at over 54 pounds, which is heavier than any of my components from college, and half of what my dainty coed neighbors weighed.

The 820S, whose US retail price is $8,000, will only do you good, if you have a Simaudio Evolution series CD player (650D and 750D), DAC (780D), phono stage (610LP and 810LP), or preamp (740P). The 820S bypasses and replaces the above models' own interior power supplies. An 820S can power up to two of the above components.

When I was in college, there were no maps (paper, satellite, or Google) of the wooded areas just outside of the Crown-Merrill apartments. So when we trekked into the forest at night, we felt like we were exploring.

This 820S comes with warranty card and explanation; promotional literature; QC checklist; and manual.

The lack of city lights made the forest north of the Crown-Merrill apartments very dark, especially when the tall trees' branches and canopies blocked out the moonlight. It's not the same as the moonlight beaming down on us, but this is what the top of the 820S looks like. Yes, it is exactly the same as the Evolution 750D. Note that its top sports 8 hexhead screws, which you will have to remove, in order to access the internal fuses [more on those in a future post]. Also note that the 820S' top does NOT have ventilation slots. Thus, dust cannot get into the innards. Not generating any heat, the 820S is meant to be powered up at all times. Cool; literally and figuratively.

During all four years I was at UC Santa Cruz, the beds in the dorms and apartments were always separated. If you wanted to stack them in a bunk arrangement, you had to ask maintenance for the dowel pins.

Now that Student Housing crams more students into the same units, the beds now come stacked. There's just no room to separate the Twin XL bunks.

When I moved into the Crown-Merrill apartments (pictured above), my housemates and I cobbled together enough electronics, to form a stereo system. We did not have an entertainment center or audio/video rack, so we had to make do, with stacking the components, one on top of another.

My roommate Eric was, uh, a bit on the rotund size. Guys would point to Eric's man-boobs, and kid that he was "stacked." Moreover, Todd's girlfriend (I forget her name) would occasionally sleep over. In the morning, she would walk out topless, and make breakfast. She had good-sized boobs, and was considered "stacked." Alas, the hungry Eric was more interested in the stacks of pancakes.

To get started in this review of the Simaudio Mind 180, my current household decided to go small, and stack it with the matching Moon 100D. Again, after making the connections (both physical and wireless), downloading all of the apps and software, organizing the sources, we used the Mind app (I use it on an iPad), to send digital data to the Moon 100D.

I moved into the Crown-Merrill apartment at the beginning of the Fall 1991 quarter. On the musical front, that meant the dreaded grunge revolution. On the audio front, that was the time people already had CD players. Wanting even more out of the CD format, consumers now wanted to migrate to digital separates: CD transport and DAC. And the affordable DAC of choice then was the Audio Alchemy DDE v1.0. A quarter century later, DACs are the anchor, but the transport is now a streaming device, such as the Simaudio Mind 180.

By now, everyone is aware that, during my senior year of college (92-93), my stereo system comprised the Sony CDP-520ES II; Adcom GTP-400 and GFA-535; and Pinnacle PN-5+. That GTP-400 had 1 phono input, and 3 line-level inputs. One of those line-level inputs was for the Sony CD player. So that still left us with two. Neither of us had a tape deck

My housemate Tron had a 13" color TV. It had a wireless remote, and an F-type connector, so we could directly hook up the CATV feed. However, this TV was monaural, not stereo. It did have RCA composite video and mono audio input and output. To feed the TV's sound to the Adcom GTP-400, we initially used a throwaway patchcord, with one male RCA at one end, two male RCAs at the other. Too bad the audiodharma Cable Cooker did not exist back then. In the 2000s, my colleagues Cooked such patchcords, with positive results.

Later in the school year, I acquired another AudioQuest Topaz interconnect, for my stereo back at home in San Francisco. That freed up a Monster Cable IL-400. I then dug up a gold-plated, L-shaped, roughly 1.5" Monster Cable adapter, with a male RCA at one end, two female RCAs at the other.

So here we are, 24 years later. Instead of converting mono to two channels, we now need to convert RCA to RJ45, so we can use the audiodharma Cable Cooker to treat Ethernet cables. Computer/electronic supply stores carry such adapters, about which I wrote on my last Cable Cooker post.

But now audiodharma themselves make their own cryogenically-treated adapter, with 1 male RCA plug and 1 female RJ45 socket. In the set above, one has black heat shrink wrap, the other green. I am not sure about current-production sets, but for this particular one, signal should flow from black to green.

During my senior year, my 3 housemates and I lived in UC Santa Cruz's Crown-Merrill apartments, nestled at the edge of the forest. The school's mascot was (and still is) the Banana Slug. Even though I had AudioQuest cables, which were good enough, I still stared at the Audio Advisor, Stereophile, TAS, and other audio promotional literature, and dreamed about Cardas cables, whose promise was a more organic and "natural" sound. Indeed, my power amp at home, the Muse Model One Hundred, sported Cardas RCA jacks and binding posts.

The audiodharma Ethernet adapter uses a Cardas RCA, which waves the magic wand, makes that tingly sound, and brings me back to that most wonderful 92-93 school year.

Sorry, I can't make up anything enchanting about the female RJ45 side. It is a computer supply part, and not even my computer science major housemate, Ron, found electronic parts sexy. He just wanted them to work. So let us hope that this female RJ45 works for years.

To me, Cardas' snail/nautilus shell logo was the complement to UCSC's Banana Slug mascot (slugs, by definition, don't have a shell). Yes, that is a glow-in-the-dark rubberized banana slug toy. Sounds kinky, but isn't.

The more important scientific thing is, we have three identical Ethernet cables. Leave one untreated. Use the generic RCA/RJ45 adapters to Cook the second cable. Then use the audiodharma adapters, while Cooking the third cable.

Keep the audio/video system constant, with the only change being the Ethernet cable. Using the untreated Ethernet cable as the baseline, cable #2, Cooked with the generic RCA/RJ45 adapters, has a MAJOR influence, greatly reducing grain, in both audio and video. Cooked with the audiodharma RCA/RJ45 adapters, cable #3 takes another small step forward, in terms of grain reduction. That leads to a more refined sound and picture.