Do It Yourself

I started this chat for us general wood monkeys in the hope of getting some good tips on finishing wood. I've managed to get my stuff to a decent level of smoothness and nicely sanded without too many blemishes but some woods have a honking big and deep grain. What is a good method of filling grain to get a very smooth surface without the filler looking artificial? I've tried wetting the wood to raise the grain and smooth it down, then using wet sanding to help fill the grain with it's own sawdust. That's not too bad on the finer grain woods, the coarser stuff is still problematic. I tried some various generic wood fillers with little success, so any hints as to what i…

I was impressed to see the great work done on these two sets of Stax Lambda Pro drives by Jazz over at Head Fi that I thought that his post should be duplicated here for members to see. Don't know how many times I played with my Lambda phones on my head to see if I could simulate Sigma style sound. Kudos to Jazz for two jobs well done. See JaZZ's custom made Stax Phones here...Homemade Headphones? - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio Jazz's comments below..... The idea of making my own housings for Stax drivers was born out of my experience with the Lambda and the Sigma Pro. Whereas the Lambda sounded too shrill (with the SRM-1 [?]) -- and …

Posted this on the other forum, but I get the feeling the audience here will probably enjoy this as well. If I'm breaking any rules by posting this here too please let me know....or just delete it. Cheers. I've started building a pair of Zaph's Bargain Mini's (ZBM) along with Zaph's SR-71. I'll be documenting my build progress in this thread with pictures and comments. Making this thread somewhat for your entertainment and for me to use it somewhat as a log of progress (or lack thereof) as these will basically be my second and third woodworking projects to date. Hope you enjoy this thread as much as I (hopefully) will enjoy the build! I'm planning on building the bo…

So who is going to be building one of THESE new Buffalo DACS using the ESS ES9018 Sabre32 DAC Chip? This may just be the DAC I have been looking for as it can take PCM up to 32bits and 192kHz as well as DSD. This may just get me back into some DIY.

Received my RS-2 a few days back, the previous owner used GS1000 big bowls with them which fit very tightly and left an annoying residue around the inside edging of both cups. It's a very minor concern, but I was wondering what I should use to get rid of the black gunk? Muchos Gracias.

I'd appreciate some advice here. My mini-dacs' xlr output volume is too high for comfortable listening. I intend to make use of attenuators/voltage dividers of type U (shown below) to manage the volume to a comfortable level. That I've seen here I've done some testing and the value of resistance that works best for me is an attenuation of 30dB (68K ohm on both pin 2 and 3 (the R1 positions)). The value of resistance I measure between pin 2 and 3 on my mini-dac when it's unpowered is 4450 ohm. I am presuming this is the source impedance and should be matched by the shunt resistance (shown as R2). My 4-channel rockhopper beta22 is fitted with two dact CT2 atten…

Hey, I was wondering if anyone might know of other attenuation curves, other than the standard log? What I'm thinking of is something that uses multiple logarithmic slopes, but I cannot really expect this to be a novel idea on my part. I have an idea that I'm working out, but was wondering if there was anyone else that has gone down this path? My one requirement is constant input impedance My second question has to do with SMD resistors. I'm looking at the Vishay Dale TNPW and Susumu RG/RGH (due to vanishingly low tempco values), but was wondering if there were other lines out there you guys might be aware of. I'm focusing on thin film resistors at the moment (unless t…

It seems you bastards have finally led me to a trail of misery and pain and I feel I should repay you with dumb questions. I plan on this thread growing as my dumbness expands into more areas. I'll start with one question that's been bugging me for a little while.. Resistors. Does the power rating matter as long as they're not underrated for any particular circuit? I've seen 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 watt and so on. Does it matter as far as performance/sound goes?

Are the connectors Etymotic uses to attach the cables to the pods of the ER4 custom? I'm thinking of building a cable for them and would hate to splice the original connectors.

I was hunting around in the garage last night and came across an old t-amp I put together many moons ago and it has a TKD pot attached, I bought it quite a while ago and don't recall where from. Are these any good? It's 50k so I figured it'd probably be ok for either the SS I'm about to start or maybe even the Dyna. I can't find too much info on it and nobody mentions them. looks the same as this which is listed as a Ko-on. Anyone familiar with these?

Don't be fucking wit sharp toos when you're tired, especially only 10 minutes after the wife says 'should you be doing that when you're so tired' ouch! ` That's gonna leave a mark...

I need to get a better soldering iron than the one I currently have and was wondering if there are any opinions of the Weller WP35. It looks like a decent iron and is in the price range I can afford. A full electronically controlled station is too costly so this looked ideal for me. If you know of a better iron at around the same price (no higher) please advise.

Looks Like I'm gonna have to have a dig around in there to see if I can tell what's wrong and try to fix it. I hope it's simple like the jack connection. I'll pop it open and post some gratuitous pics in a bit...

There are a few of us building this amp, and at least two of us that have taken this on as a first project, so I'm thinking a thread is in order, since I'm sure that there will be some discussion and questions.

I've been lending a hand with board layouts for a few projects, notably for a build of Kevin Gilmore's DynaFET design, and doing so made me realize two things: (a) there aren't any DIY projects for amps with a truly high-end feature set, and ( I want one, but I can't really afford it. The DIY crowd has some amazing analog designers and has produced some really astounding designs, but the supporting and surrounding circuitry often isn't much more than a pot and maybe a selector switch, and sometimes a power LED or relay control circuit. There's so much more that could be done to make amps more convenient, self-monitoring, and just plain nifty. So I decided that this was an…

PM me for Paypal account details Hello all I have discussed the idea of honouring Alex Cavalli aka runeight on the DIY forum with a few members and there seems to be general consensus that this is a just cause. Who is Alex Cavalli? He is many things; but for many of us he is an inovator of ingenious design and he has given selflessly of himself for the past decade. Here is a link to his website where you can see a few of his designs that have come to fruition and many have the pleasure of owning. Why now? Well simply put, in a recent conversation I had with him it became clear that he needed better headphones and I got to thinking that this would be one…

Recently I purchased a B22 from Spritzer. The unit was built by Nate, so it's a nice Nugget Audio 3 boards + 1 Sigma 22, single ended, 8x gain unit, made to work on 230VAC. Apart from exquisite care to avoid hum and lower the noise floor, it features a dual input to select from two sources from a rear switch. Spritzer had changed this feature to a loop, so the switch was disabled and while one of the inputs is used, the other one works as an output. I point this because that switch resulted a handy addition. The amp works very well and sounds great with all of my cans, but as time living with it passed, I started to feel annoyed for the fact that being my so…

As stated in title, if I can build an interconnect, can I make a power cable? Anything special I need to know so that I don't burst into flames?

Per subject, I see that Soniccraft has a 20% off everything sale going on. It doesn't list dates, so I assume for February? Sonic Craft Specials

I realize this isn't audio related, but I'm in the process of rewiring a bunch of antique lamps. I could use a 50' or 100' spool of lamp 18ga 2-conductor lamp cord. The local hardware store charges 40-80 cents a foot. Any suggestions where I should look online for lamp cord and other parts?

I'm looking for something that adds basic control functionality to a computer IDE drive (pause, previous track etc). The front buttons are just eject and play/next track. Is there a simple solution for this?

So, gathering interest for collaboration on KG's Dynafet. The way this would work is quite simple. There would be a group buy on parts as well as the boards. The parts would be supplied by myself and we'd work a deal out for people contributing in the matching efforts and various aspects of specing and acquiring parts. The boards would be the Hitachi version with external heat sinks, using KG's latest board files. Front end would be constructed from devices matched from a pool of 500 2SJ74BL and 500 2SK170BL matched to 20uA accuracy. All devices were pulled from original Toshiba packaging. Actually matched to 10uA with +/- 20uA measurement uncertainty added on t…

Just curious, does anyone happen to have a variac I could borrow for a bit? If not, I suppose I could go ghetto...

I'm looking for suggestions of interesting DAC designs and/or PCBs/kits. I guess I'm shooting for the higher end of things, and PCM1704-based stuff has gotten my attention. So far I've found the Hagerman Chime and TentLabs kit. Any opinions on these? Anything else I should consider? Also, are there any standalone USB-I2S or analog output stage kits worth looking at? Thanks!

I've started up this thread to give folks a place to offer their time/parts/labor whatever to help Icarium get his SP amp up and running and with a little luck maybe even sounding good. Hopefully this thread will to organize the effort that I'm sure has already begun via PM's. If your unaware of Dan's situation: