Do It Yourself

What is the best way to break one? Thanks, Biggie.

Where to buy a stax 5 pin female plug?

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…

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…

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?

Just wondering if anyones tried Craig's teflon, pressure adjustable tube sockets? They're very $$$ ($70) but if I was building a 300B/2A3 amp using "the good stuff" parts, it wouldn't be totally out of line. http://www.eddiecurrent.com/Tube_Socket.html

Hi all, As part of my home theater build, have decided to go for 3 way actives for front LCR… so, need to build 9 power amps for fronts and 8 amps for surrounds… to pair up with my Sherbourn PT-7020A pre/pro. I needed something as easy, but more powerful. This is when I and my friend John found the datasheet of TDA7293. This IC can run up to 100V, low distortion, and can easily be paralleled. Having built single chip amp and extensive listening TDA7293 is my favorites for IC power amp applications. I have been looking for a source of PCBs using parallel TDA7293s… there are not many out there that you can buy. We then decided to do our own PCB. Our schematic is almost…

I was going to build a balanced isolation transformer. But I had difficult to choose form either EI or toroid. Regardless of price and size, which theoretically will be better (in performance)? I was planning to build around 2KVA. Does anyone have experience?

Do any DIY experts have any any intel on modding Stax cables to be removable at the earspeaker ala the Stax SR-L700MK2 ? I'm interested because I have a couple of worn out Stax, the cable is fatigued at the strain relief up top and is causing drop outs and static. I've seen youtube vids regarding this fix, but am leery that the connectors used may not be able to safely handle the voltages involved. The connectors are circular four pin mini bayonet style, gold plated pins with what appears to be a black phenolic plastic insulator around them. There is no mention of part numbers used, other than that MrSpeakers sells these connectors. On his website, he …

Oh, the number of times I have mentioned how much I like Steve Blinn or Adona rack designs! Extruded aluminum exudes strength and elegance, gotta love those T-slots... but, the price, yikes! Well, in my never-ending quest to one day build myself something along those lines, I came across this little gem of a site: http://www.framexpert.com/ What's so special about it? A FREE download program that lets you build whatever you want using the t-slots. I've been playing with the erector set for about an hour now and it is pretty easy to use, especially given the fact that I have no experience with 3-D software whatsoever. It even provides a cost estimate of your build a…

Hi, I know there are many schematics like this but this aims to be a very cheap amplifier for the estats and it should be better than the SRD boxes. The power supply for tube has +-300 V and there will be four windings on transformer for heaters. I know I can not trust the simulation so I think it will have a maximum output voltage around 500 V peak to peak with some luck, probably less. I took the CSS from SRX+, so credit goes to JimL. Output current is set to 6mA per one output. So 12mA per channel. I added small feedback to stabilize it with 470k resistors. My goal is to make a small cheap amplifier. Voltage output is rather small than other amps bu…

My P/S caps are 220mFd electrolytics. My unterstanding is that the higher the value, the greater the storage capacity... increasing the amps bass performance. If so, what value should I stop at? I.E. How high is "too high"? Do cap brands really make a sonic difference? My power supply is two 9V cells, with virtual ground between the two 9V batteries.... Similar to the RA1, however the RA1 doesn't use electrolytic capacitors in its power scheme. Are the P/S caps even necessary in the above schematic?

I was thinking of getting some to case up my b22. Mailed perforate.com a hell lot of times and still no reply. anyone know where to get them?

What standards are people using for reterminating these? I'm planning on a single 4-pin XLR rather than 2 3-pin as it is less cumbersome. Does a male connector on the phones with pin 1 for R+, 2 for R-, 3 for L-, and pin 4 for L+, and 2 and 3 connected together for use in single ended amps sound right? Also, anyone know the stock Grado wire colors before I cut this thing apart? If it matters, these are RS-1's bought about 6 years ago.

I would like to build my new balanced rig properly. Should a source have male or female XLR terminals, and again what should the amp have?

Hey everyone, I was wondering if anyone on here makes wooden grado cups as I have a pair of Turbulence X drivers and am in need of some wooden cups to help complete my Magnums I'm building. I have very positive trader feedback on head-fi if anyone is willing to help me out. Cheers, Erich

I have decided to go ahead and build the SR-X for my 007 MK1 and am going to be ordering boards for both the amp and PSU (ordering from pcbnet.com). If you would like an amp and/or PSU board please let me know and I will start a list. Files that were submitted are below: SR-X Board: http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/boards/srx6.zip JimL Shunt PSU (PLEASE NOTE: This is the revised board KG recently updated): http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/boards/srxshunt3.zip LIST: Knerian: 1 amp/1 psu n3rdling: 2 amp/2 psu No_One: 2 amp/2 psu VelvetX: 1 amp/1 psu gwrskien: 2 amp/2 psu kingofsnake: 0 amp…

Interesting thread that has popped up from some recent controversy in Stereophile surround the Halco amps. A few heavy-weights are in on this discussion, so it should be interesting! http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=1404200

Saw this stuff for sale on diyaudio and thought of you guys... would this be the proper stuff for making electrostatic headphone membranes? diyAudio Forums - ESL films any interest?

So for a little while now my Sony DAS-R1 has had a problem with the left channel cutting out. It used to get better by itself after a minute or so, then it needed longer. Now I have the lid unscrewed all the time and give it a wee tap. While this cures the symptom it doesn't cure the disease and the wee tap is now turning into a prod, before I know it, I'll be using a frame hammer. I'd like to fix this myself however I only just know which end of a soldering iron plugs into the mains and which end you use to burn your fingers touch against things to heat them up. I've looked under the board and I cannot see any obviously broken connections. I am fairly certain that …

We're doing a quick moving T2 board set group buy; there are two members and we have a quote for two more (but will go ahead regardless). Specs are ... FR4Blue solder MaskWhite silkscreen2.36 mm thicknessENIG3 oz cuIPC-class 2100% e-TestedThe buy consists of a set of the full sized boards; one power supply and one amplifier board, $225 for the set + shipping and PayPal fees. Post interest here and we will close the buy in one week. If we have more then 4 participants the price will be lower.

In Netherland there's not much people interested in headphones, but thank god, I've found three persons in my building and I successfully persuaded them to build the 8 EML tubes fully dc coupled DHT amp. They're speaker guys, anyway since their children are too young and the wives want to keep the family quiet, they agreed to try headphones. We will do it toghter, one person alone couldn't afford it. We want to build it, yes, 120% sure

I assume frontpanelexpress.com is who I want to use if I want a 3.5"x2" engraved faceplate made for my amp? I'm messing around with their software right now, any tips? Thanks

I'm going to create a thread for this amp since it is my intention at the end of the build to publish the schematic and any relevant details so that anyone who's crazy enough can build this amp. So for now this (and the amp) are a work in progress and just somewhere where I can share pictures. Actual information will come later. Night #0 of PS chassis fabrication: I did a preliminary layout of all of the parts on a large 17" x 14" x 4" Hammond Steel chassis that I happened to have laying around. It seemed big enough so I took rough measurements of where everything was located so that I could tweak them later for better alignment and symmetry. I'm not all that concerne…

So I recently picked up a couple of niche audio control modules. They're unusual passive summing boxes/mixers controlled entirely by midi. It's 8 inputs, 8 outputs, and then a summed out. The 8 inputs and 8 outputs are TS unbalanced, with a TRS out that's 1-4 TS and 5-8 RS. If I were to make an XLR patch panel that has 4 XLR inputs that send each channel to pins 1/2 and 1/3 as TS cables, would this result in a 4 channel balanced mono summing mixer?