Do It Yourself

Any easy way to remove the magnets from speakers? I have some little 4 and 5" drivers I replaced in one of my cars and would love to keep the magnets.

I just bought a 1lb reel of Kester 245 solder online and the date of manufacture is 11/30/04. The website says that their leaded solder 'goes off' after 3 years. Given this is almost 6 years old, should I return it or not worry about it and just use it? Slightly reluctant to return it as Kester is not so easy to get locally here in the UK and I wanted to buy a decent/premium product for my first forays into serious (non-disastrous) soldering.

A friend and I are both building Pearl IIs. A sizable portion of the cost is capacitors. I don't have enough experience to have a well developed gut feeling for value or any favorite brands. There are basically three flavors we have to chose: big-ish electrolytics that smooth power, caps in the RIAA network that are between the signal and ground and two coupling caps, smack dab in the signal path -one is two paralleled film caps of small-ish value and right at the output we have what is specified to be a 22uF electrolytic, bypassed with a film cap. There's an armload of these things, so just buying the fanciest boutique brands all the way through doesn't seem like …

I'm looking for something small to put in my garage for blowing dust around, airing up tires, and perhaps using a small air tool with (finish nailer or something). Small and maintenance free would be nice. I've seen a couple pancakes by Husky and noticed that now Woodcraft sells a Woodriver unit that is relatively cheap. Budget is <$150. I've looked occasionally on Craigslist for something used, but nothing that is at all "new" has popped up... recommendations?

This is probably going to seem like a go-to-Head-Fi thread, but I'm in a bit of a DIY and audio equipment rut, and I really trust Head-Case a whole lot more to get me out of it...... I've built myself DACs for home (Buffalo) and office (y2). I've got an M3 at the office with Audio Technica ESW9's and AD900's, I have the Exstata with SR-Lambdas at home, and I've built and sold a couple of Millett Hybrids. I'm pretty chuffed with all of this equipment, but feel that I'm still a long distance from my audio end-game and really want to keep doing more DIY. So where do I go now? I'd really like to challenge myself with something new to further my electronics skills, and keep…

So, I want to build an L-Pad based headphone adapter so I can connect headphones to the speaker outputs of an amp. This is mainly for S&Gs, but if it works great then I have the added bonus of having my innate and poverty-enhanced cheapness vindicated. I was planning to use this information from Meier to optimize the impedance for my headphones: http://www.meier-audio.homepage.t-online.de/ - click on "tips and tricks" and look under the impedance optimization title. One thing I can't figure out (yes, I'm challenged with these types of calculations) is how many watts the resistors should need to be able to disspate. Let's assume I have an amp that maxes out aro…

Anybody seen these yet? Pretty damn sexy, really. Hopefully they are easy to get hold of...... Walnut Chassis with Aluminum Top Panel Steel Chassis & Bottom Plates with Walnut Side Panels Aluminum Chassis & Bottom Plates with Walnut Side Panels Example:

Here is one of the many projects I'm working on and it is intended as the last stand for the classic BH design. The back story ties in with the whole T2 project and that Torpedo was invaluable in acquiring the amp for me. Now we started talking about building a Blue Hawaii for him using the pile of boards I have here and to cut a long story his friend Paxti got involved as well which is a is a good thing since he owns a machine shop. We all had the same vision which is to go stark raving mad with this project using the best parts and not to cut any corners. Now the ultimate chassis has to be something milled out of solid aluminum and that's exactly what we decided to …

I'd been wanting to build a pair of speakers for a while and finally took the plunge this summer. Right now I've pretty much finished up the bare cabinets and am waiting for a pair of drivers and a couple cross over components to finish them up. So far everything's gone well but I have a couple of questions. With this being my first build, some of my cuts aren't absolutely perfect and so after gluing the panels together, some panels jutted out just a little bit. I ground down the seams which made the surface smooth but now the box isn't perfectly square especially around a couple of corners. You can't really tell by looking but the boxes don't quite sit flat. Woul…

I have a Nice 20" Craftsman D.P. I bought recently. So I'm drilling (butchering) a computer case presently and the tapered chuck spindle keeps dropping off! I cleaned it up real well and have seated it against a blcok of wood with some pressure. Fell out pretty easy. I retracted the chuck and pounded it in with a dead blow hammer. Didn't help. Then took a small masonry hammer and some wood and pounded the crap out of it I thought. Still fell out. What's the super secret way of wedging that gadget in there!

I've read as much as a I on the topic and there seems to be fair arguments for both amps. It seems HC fosters a fair few with impressions of both amps, so I figured I'd ask here for opinions. My situation is this: I don't plan to begin building/organising the eventual winner of this topic for at least 5 months, but as the changing of hands of djgardner's KG amp stash to AMB has offered me a wonderful oppurtunity. Get the boards and the majority of the transistors from one place, and Ti even offers matching which would cut down on alot of the hassle. All in all, this may be the best opportunity I have to build a dynahi. But I don't want to build it if the β22 would …

was trying to re-wire the left driver of my ad700's, when the actual tiny copper solder tab lifted off the base of the driver... I still have it, but how the hell do i put it back??? It is the bottom left solder tab on the left driver (ground). Have i completely screwed my cans or is it fixable. Any advice greatly appreciated!

I've never done this before, but partly due to seeing a pic of an amp that Nate had built, I was thinking of countersinking two screws on the bottom of the l'espressivo torpedo prototype that I am building for my brother. So, a couple of questions: [*]Is a Hammond 1455 case such as what is used thick enough to countersink a 4-40 flat head machine screw in? [*]Countersink bits: do you need one for each size you are doing? I would be most likely to use 4-40 or 6-32. [*]Angle: I see 82

Has anyone played with biasing capacitors that normally only see AC with a small amount of DC? I know some commercial speaker manufacturers have been doing this for a while (Vandersteen, Infinity, JBL, etc. comes to mind) usually using a battery and often accompanied by fancy marketing speak ("Charge-Coupled Linear Definition Dividing Network"). There is a lot of ink spilled on the subject, but what do you say?

So I sent my K1000 to Fitz a little while back for a re-cable. Today upon removing the wire mesh grills Fitz discovered someone's handiwork... Nice huh? The person I bought them from mentioned that they had new drivers installed, but forgot to mention the custom port in the side of one driver! He also never mentioned they were installed by anyone other than AKG. I've looked back through PMs here and there to discover who the seller was, but sadly can't find the PMs. I also can't find the sale ad. I do remember he was a young kid from England, and it would have been around November of 2008 when I purchased them. Not that I'd get any satisfaction monetarily, b…

Hi everyone one year ago I bought two Aikido 24V and two Max Millet boards, I have assembled them with BJT and MOSFET. Great DIY project, great sound, really. The "valve sound" when I was young.... I like very much the Aikido sound with the LM317 buffer (great idea!!!!), this is my preferred headphone amply, and I like too the Millet diamond buffer stage, so why don't create a new headphone amp with the best of both Aikido and Millet? Et voil

So I have a Bijou built by dBel84 (Don) and am curious about the negative feedback. With the pot turned all the way down (7 oclock) it seems to have no negative feedback and is perfect for my AKG 340's . As you turn the pot clockwise you get less and less sound. Am I supposed to turn the negative feedback up when using Grado's and Ultrasones ( I know everybody at head-case loves Ultrasones) If I turn it up too much it seems to loose a lot of the lushness of the amp. I am still trying to figure out the best spot for my low impendence phones. Anybody got any advice? Chris

Yet another stax project soon. A lot of people are going to want this i think. Birgir knows what it is, and had better not drop any hints hint: diffuse field.

This is for use on my balanced beta22, the zobel networks described at amb`s beta22 site are: 22Ω 2W 5% metal oxide power resistor and 0.047

I was chatting to justin and cetoole last night, asking for a solution to produce low volumes of sound, max -40dB down into the -80`s and below. Comfortably loud for me with my rs-1`s is up to -52dBu with pro mastered (+4dBu) material, using my donuts (yh-100`s) comfortably loud rises up to -44 dBu. The suggestion that came up, apart from a vinyl source was to I know very little about what is required to drive electrostatics so will really need a builder to construct this for me. A pre-built stuffed Stax bias supply PCB is available from spritzer. I`d really like to try this with my SR-3`s. Anyone willing to construct this for me please let me know. I ha…

I'm trying to fix my grandma's Westinghouse electric griddle from the 50s. The resistor (at least I think that's what it is) has failed. Unfortunately, whatever insulating material was used to encase it has melted, so there is no way to make out any part value labeling. Is there some general "close enough" value part I can replace it with or is an exact replacement the only way? I know this isn't audio related, but I thought I would try asking here before seeking out a vintage appliance repair forum (which I'm sure exists somewhere).

So some parts are rolling in. I'm excited to finally get the solder iron up and running again. I'll jump on the balanced connections in a week or so, but I bought some extra wire and RCA connectors to build a pair of interconnects. I'll be using: DH Labs Pro Studio for the wire. Twisted pair inside with a shield outside (pretty standard) DH Labs RCA-3 connector. Now, the RCA-3 connector is a little different than what I have used in the past. It looks like this: It looks very much like these would be great for a digital cable (and they are 75 ohm as well). For audio, though, I have a twisted pair inside the cable with the shield outside. I'm fairly sure…

Hello, I'm looking to build a gamma2 DAC, but shipping costs from all the different vendors makes it very expensive here in europe. If anyone is getting parts for this soon, would it be possible to order double the parts and ship them to me? I'd be very thankful for this! Regards, Manuel

DACT Type 21 Stepped Attenuator Potentiometer 50K 300B - eBay (item 120473999989 end time May-24-10 11:05:02 PDT) Check these out, they look rather nice, any reason why I should try one out? The Rk27 on my millett is suffering from a much annoying channel inbalance! One of these would fit right in!

So after seeing the 60 minutes last week, and already knowing all the liquid nitrogen cooking tricks, the chemist in me idecided to try my hand at the ravioli/caviar things with the sodium alginate. Yesterday's try was a complete disaster, but today came out almost perfect. As with all of this kind of stuff, technique is all important. Its helpful to have a stash of USP grade chemicals to pull this off... So i present mohito caviar, and mohito ravioli http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/mg1.jpg http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/mg2.jpg Maybe we can have birgir show us how to do this...Correctly