luvdunhill

guys I may not be around here much today and tomorrow. If possible, I'd love to have the owners of the various sourcing efforts drop in a rough estimate in the next few days so we can get some commitment by the interested parties, as we may be looking at some lead time for some of the semiconductors to keep prices down. Also, there will be another run for the dual heat sinks and that will take time as well. Then there is the board finalization and fabrication. As soon as we can get these items moving, the better, as we could be talking 4-6 weeks easily. The next steps forward as I see it is a rough cost with a few options, then a final commitment to at least the above costs (boards, semiconductors, and tiny heat sinks) then finally a deposit made for the above items. Chris: as far as the boards go, I think a rough cost based on the board size in the original files would be good enough for now. Looks like 50 is a good number. If/when Jacob Potter wants to get involved, you guys can go to town on the boards. Naaman: I'd prefer a single box version if the chassis is large enough. I see no reason to waste performance of a low output impedance power supply on 3 feet of wire and a bunch of connectors. However, I'm usually alone in this opinion. I'll leave this direction up to you for estimation purposes. It's not a super critical decision at the moment, as long as the committing parties are away of the potential cost and labor associated with 2 boxes. Also, I'm of the opinion that the bigger the heat sinks the better, so perhaps we can offer two size of cases, one that caters towards the 4-channel / speaker amp builds and one for the 2-channel builds.. again, your call.

...that and there would be a lot of heat to deal with both in the amp and the power supply.

FWIW, I think it will take some work to make this amp stable with lower gains.

I dunno, we like need wire and you seem to always have a lot of it lying around ... I can always give this one to someone else if you aren't up for it!

I don't want to be accused of only selling boards after all

luvdunhill - 8 - 4 Naamanf - 6 - 4 looser101 - 4 - 2 n_maher - 4 - 0 Digipete - 8 - 4 Pars - 6 - 2 Fing - 4 - 4 Asr - 0 - 4 Stretch - 0 - 4 PFKMan23 - 0 - 4 Icarium - 4 - 4 Dreadhead - 0 - 4 ok, here's what I'm thinking in terms of responsibility: luvdunhill - JFET / MOSFET matching and device procurement pars - boards / BJT matching looser101 - BJT matching Naamanf - Cases / heatsinks / mounting hardware / IO Boards (including jacks) Digipete - passive component procurement and matching n_maher - internal wiring procurement and distribution Icarium - toroid procurement and distribution ?? - power supply (sigma22) kitting <everyone else> - shilling and general "investment protection" I think the rough plan would be that all the boards and power supplies are built and tested. Cases would be speced out so that things are pretty much plug and play with no soldering required. The I/O board would contain PCB mount jacks and probably there would be a front and rear panel board that would be scored and could be broken out. Wires from each PCB would be pre-soldered by the builder/tester and then just connected to the IO boards. The boards would already be connected to the angled aluminum (done by the builder) (edit: maybe this is a bad idea, but this shouldn't be that hard for the end user to do as long as the devices could be protected in transit) and then this angled aluminum would just be screwed into the already tapped heat sinks. I'm not sure to what extent this is feasible, but sounds like a good idea to me. This way the cases would just be shipped once to the organizer and then a second time to the end-user who would just assemble things together. Comments?

yeah, that would be the idea. I need to noodle on a plan a bit more... T The boards with the on-board sinks are just not acceptable to me. I have a feeling that they cannot handle enough heat (especially not in the configuration with doubled up devices) and plus they cannot accommodate the external mounting scheme, as they are turned 90 degrees.

nope, the version with external heat sinks. See post #1.

just a pin limit.

As for other group buys tagged on to this, I'll leave that up to whomever gets assigned that particular piece of the build. Still working out the assignments

Break the mold and use diptrace. Everyone's doing it. Sensible defaults to boot!

After thinking much about it, I propose that the "cost" for stuffing 2 boards should be 1 stuffed board in return. In Nate's case, I'm not sure what exactly will happen, but I think we should just force him to take the two stuffed boards and he can do with them as he sees fit. This will be more meaningful after a final cost is worked up, but I'd like this to the starting point.

same ring gauge as AMB uses I believe

okay, I'm taking some liberties here to firm up numbers and make the math work: luvdunhill - 8 - 4 Naamanf - 6 - 4 looser101 - 4 - 2 n_maher - 4 - 0 Digipete - 8 - 4 Pars - 6 - 2 Fing - 4 - 4 Asr - 0 - 4 Stretch - 0 - 4 PFKMan23 - 0 - 4 Icarium - 0 - 4 Dreadhead - 0 - 4 laxx, guzziguy, pabbi1 any interest? This isn't a commitment (yet) just need to firm up some numbers for the quantity discounts and what not.

yup, those are the correct boards. well, if we did want to rework the boards, I'd love to see the JFET comp. pairs back-to-back, as referenced at the start of this thread.

yup, this is the idea and what the heat sinks referenced in this thread bring to the table. I've talked to the manu. and he is willing to do another run. If we're talking about 50 boards, then this comes to 200 heat sinks. I need to work out cost with him, as this run would be smaller than the previous. Also, the cost for the matched JFETs won't be insignificant. 1000 of each type N and P was not a insignificant investment (look at pricing at B&D for example), plus the average of 3 minutes per device to match (including calibrating the test jig every 10 devices). This plus the heat sinks and you're not really looking at much of a "savings" over the traditional 7-zip packages. However, still cheaper than unobtanium. Then there are the MOSFETs.... I'll work on that today.

heh.. I was curious what you'd guys would say to that. Anyways, Pars and I will work offline to come up with part cost. Stay tuned.

Maybe $1250-$1500 for 4-channel build? I think we need to work a BOM based on the above quantities and go from there. I will try and get some hard quotes on semiconductors tomorrow. Perhaps Pars can take a crack at the various and sundry other items. DigiPete: What did your Dynamight build cost? I'd say an extra 20% on top of that.

I'm going to tentatively draw the line at the following: 10 amp chassis 42 part kits 50 boards Time to check the part bin.... er storage closet edit: can someone please check my math / read back through the thread and see if this sounds okay?

I'm curious what the C/W rating is of the heat sinks are though. Looks like we're talking around 3.75W per device...

I'd say let's get a quote for those cases.

If you happen to have a list of current requirements for all headphones minus a K-1000 I can try and answer that one for you ... otherwise, remember, there is no such thing as overkill in this hobby, especially in a Kevin Gilmore design

good question. Better find an appropriate floor wart for interested builders quick!

I'd say they compare favorably to commercial amps in the $5K range.

pshaw.. no one is actually going to listen to these, they are just for show