Do It Yourself

I've been playing around with vinyl rigs again for a while now. Some of you will remember that I was going to build a custom plinth for a Mitsubishi LT-30 a while back, but ended up just overlaying the plinth with Wenge. Well with my greatest resource at hand (luvdunhill) I opted for a completely custom table a while back. I purchased most of the parts earlier, but am just now finding a little free time to build the plinth. I went back and forth on the design several times, and almost ended up using some soapstone slabs. But in the end I decided on wood. Specifically the core of the plinth will be alternating layers of 3/4" MDF and Baltic Birch plywood. 6 layers to …

Thanks to a person on DIYaudio.com who had a blown MOSFET on this PH12, we now have this wonderful schematic so we can all clone "the best amp in the world that's ever been built", that is if you believe dretardwells.

I and a few others have decided to get the new bipolar version of Blue Hawaii PCB made by PCBnet in US. I used PCBnet for the Carbon GB in 2015 (and other occasions). Their price is higher but we’ve had great experience with their board quality. The boards will be 2mm thick and 4oz copper, green solder mask and white silkscreen in leaded finish. The cost of boards is $30 USD for a set (two PCBs) if we can get 15 sets made. You’ll need to add shipping from me to you for the total cost. Kevin released this latest version of Blue Hawaii in early 2016. I worked with Kevin to trace the board and at least one headcaser has built one working amp with them. This …

I'm looking to do a group run of the KGST boards, please followup on this thread if interested. Thanks -

Ill be making a balanced ckkIII with usb opus dac in one chassis: ati 737-u I have drills and tools but can only do so much. The aluminum front panel is very thick and I won't be able to make indents for the two volume knobs, or even drill two basic holes for the neutrik combos. If anyone has tools to do this stuff, I would be willing to ship the case over. Ill discuss the actual details and sizes etc and the work to be done by aim or whatever. Besides the aluminum, I will have an acrylic sheet of similar thickness and two pieces of carbon fiber sandwitched together. Whatever is drilled on the aluminum will be done the same on the acrylic. The reason is, f…

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?

So it turns out that the lme49830 is pretty much a dynafet on a chip, with diamond buffers driving the fets. SO... combine with the semelab-tt lateral audio mosfets, and the result is something super sweet, and easy to build, about $50 in parts per channel. Combine 4 channels with my balanced preamp, and have one serious kickass thing guaranteed to drive anything, he6's and k1000's included. At about 2 orders of magnitude less distortion than that other thing. And more than 10 times the available output current. at... 20hz to 20khz... .1mw .05% thd (most of which is noise) 1mw .01% thd 100mw .005% thd 1w .0003% thd many watts <.0001% thd …

Looking forward to someday having one of these built.

A few of us over at another thread started by Blueman2 are contemplating getting SRX Plus PCBs fabricated. See this thread: http://www.head-case.org/forums/topic/12445-plan-to-build-srx-where-to-find-bom-boards/ Discussion of the SRX Plus design can be found here: http://www.head-case.org/forums/topic/11996-srx-revisited/ I've checked with PCBNET and we can get the cost the amp board to $25 if we order at least 15 boards. The board will be 2mm thick with 3 oz copper, the board size is 9.35" x 6.85" ( 2 channels on one board ). Kevin has recently updated the board with teardrops enabled. We have not decided on the PS to use yet. The SRX Plus needs a +/- 340VDC a…

Hello everyone, I had started to post my attempts to build a modified KSA-5 klone over in the "krell ksa5 klone" thread, when I realized that I should create an own topic because my build would not be an exact clone... so this here is then exactly that. I will copy the previous posts here and delete there! Cheers, Alex. Hey folks, here is a first view on my take of this amplifier. I want to be able to attach the power transistors on one side via an L-bracket to a single heat sink. The power distribution sequence layout was kept in place but of course I had to do a little re-arranging. The original input stage is more or less unchanged. Both t…

So I've been looking at a bunch of tube/solid state hybrid dynamic amp schematics, and every one of them is some form of bad, or really bad. (one person/ex company in particular) Low voltage plate, capacitve coupling of a high impedance source into a low impedance, poor balance etc. There had to be a better way. true balanced input. dc coupling. low impedance output. no feedback. proper use of a tube (pure transconducance) etc so I came up with this, work in progress. 4 x 3 inches ubaltobaltubeschem.PDF

Below is -=Germania=-'s handy work for your viewing pleasure. The unit is an opus dac with usb receiver and a 41hz amp 6 t-amp. The big pictures are of the power supply to the amp that is now making a ticking sound. The front LED is no longer being powered. There is also a low hum from the unit, but I can't tell which board it is coming from. I have a multimeter and soldering iron, so if theres something uncomplicated to try, I am game. I built my power conditioner, so I'm not a total noob, but I never learned how to read circuits. Biggie.

I'd like to call into question some do's and don't I've heard about building Stax amps. I'm an engineer who works on scientific instrumentation and have heard a few things I don't understand based on my experience, so thought it's worth a discussion here. Please correct me if my thoughts on these issues is incorrect, from an engineering perspective. High Voltage resistors are necessary In general HV boutique resistors are really only needed when there’s a large differential voltage. Let's take a high quality but not HV resistor, the KOA Speer which range from 250V-1kV working voltage http://www.koaspeer.com/catimages/Products/MF-MFS-RK/MF-MFS-RK.pdf Take…

Hey- Roundabouts how much would a balanced b22 cost to have built (by someone else, not me)? just a range, thanks.

OK, so every year about this time, i decide to do something silly and over the top. Last year was the titanium hammer. I need ideas for this year. Has to involve computer controlled machine tools. Has to involve expensive raw materials... Obviously it has to be practically useless.

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?

I am not sure if these will live up to the title but it's the name of the speakers so I figured I would go with it. This will just be a down and dirty diary of the cabinet build for my soon to arrive Audio Nirvana Super 10 cast basket drivers. The box is about as simple as it gets. Rectangle with a couple holes cut in it for ports and mounting the drivers. I will be using primarily 3/4" (actually 11/16") Baltic birch and a bit of MDF. Here is all the wood cut up and ready for glue. All clamped up. As you can see I have some cheap ass Harbor Freight clamps that bow under the pressure. But they cost $1.50 so I can't complain.

Oh effing snap. The LCDuino-1 I/O processor - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio

I didn't find anything in search, which was surprising. Maybe I suck at searching. Anyway, a couple q's for those that own one or more: 1) How do vintage ones hold up? How often do they need recalibration? I'm not talking about serious vintage, with 50 tubes inside, but 1970s to 1980s solid state stuff. 2) Specific brands to look for/avoid? 3) What's the cheapest decent digital oscilloscope that can be hooked up to a PC? This or something close to it is what I'm used to using in the labs (yes I know it's a couple thousand... used): Digital Phosphor Oscilloscopes: TDS3000C Series > Data Sheets : Tektronix Specifically TDS3012B. 4) How useful/not useful has i…

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 …

Where to buy a stax 5 pin female plug?

So I was working on the torpedo top cover and left it outside the house for the paint to dry. Awesomely enough a fucking duck put dirt and shit all over it. I have access to home depot and limited funds. Is there anything that can be done to fix this so I can start over or did the duck fuck it all? Thanks

Well cheap compared to all the monster amps out there So correctly done, one would do the Uberamp2-Raal edition, which results in something really big,heavy and lot of heat. And a custom and large chassis, and a pile of $$$ This is a bit cheaper and easy enough for just about anyone to do. From the Ti Opa541 datasheet, showing paralled opamps good for at least 7 amps rms of output into anything including a dead short... Designed to be mounted directly to the heatsink, amp board right angle to the heatsink. All wires to the board directly soldered, 4 oz copper highly recommended. Power supplies are a minimum of 24V at 10 amps, like this, but more …

I could not help but notice that the dead tree carcass machinists have a thread on wood machining. But dead trees do not make the best cases for stax amplifiers. So i'm a little surprised that there is no thread dedicated to CNC machining metal. The motivation for this thread was that I turned 50 years old a few weeks ago and for my birthday I decided to buy myself a CNC machine so that I could make my own cases for my stax builds. I decided to buy the foxalien Vasto, https://www.foxalien.com/products/cnc-router-machine-vasto?sca_ref=725103.t6qfXeHAnx based on not much more than I needed to machine 400mm by 400mm and the reviews on youtube are very positive. I'm waiting f…

I'm looking for some new hex keys/allen wrenches. I have the typical cheap set and assorted ones that came with furniture, but those suck because they tend to corrode or get stripped by tight screws. I need a set that is well-made and has more torque than the typical L-shaped keys. I know Klein makes sets, but they can get pricey. Any recommendations?