Well, I can not speak for Jeff, but YES! If you can tolerate the weight, the mechanical hum (damn hard to get rid of it), not to mention that you can't place it near the anlog front-end (electrical hum), then I would concur that choke inputs are better.
Why?
Lots of reasons.
One, current peaks on the transformer are much lower. This helps to reduce gabage created by the recitifiers switching on and off.
Two, it adds ripple reduction. Back when all we had was tube amps, with wimpy little filter caps, we had to use choke input supplies. Somehow, things still managed to sound good. Right?
Yeah, I know.....only two reasons. Yes, but. There are sublte interactions between transformer VA rating and core utilisation, peak charging curents, filter cap size and ESR/ESL, that can not be easily explained. (Trust me, ok?) You could spend a lifetime building amps, and not be able to explain or predict how it all works.
Anyway, the Far East market is very demanding. If Jeff said that his agents there kvetched about hum, then I would take that as gospel.
As for batteries:
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but batteries sound noisy. I realise in many circles that is the hot mod of choice, but listen to one long enough, and you will concur. Sure, no 120 Hz ripple, but that may be its only advantage.
I believe the SMPS that Jeff uses employs a technique called "power factor correction". To the user, how it actually works should not be important. What should be important is that it should reduce noise generated in the AC/DC process.
