AdamR

Greetings from Wellington NZ. Took me a while because I used to be on Stereonet NZ before it folded into here. I have been building homebrew tube gear since 2016. At home evefrything in my signal chain after the DAC is homebrew and I like it that way! I love that with tubes you can do a lot with not many watts. Anyone got tube questions, shoot them my way. Cheers

This https://www.chord.co.uk/product/epic-streaming-cable/ £450 for 1 metre ethernet patch cable

So apparently, if you run an all-digital system, the choice of NAS your store your content on has a bearing on the sound http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm Who'd a thought?

Watch the high voltages with tube gear! Great to see the interest in tube tech being picked up by someone born in the 21st century. Plenty of bargains out there for old stuff to cannibalize - good luck!

Another DIY-er on board! Welcome Always been keen on Plinius gear, ever since I bought a 2.4 / 3100 pre/power combo in my early 20s... back when they were still in Palmerston North I believe.

I'm in my Happy Place with amplifiers (designed and built my own tube amps) but I don't guarantee anything else ... speakers, DACs, cartridges... cables... Daily Driver... Only 15 wpc but how sweet it sounds! My first ever build. Maybe I'll put it on a better looking chassis one day, but I will not change the electronics... this thing is simultaneously a jackhammer and a scalpel One piece of gear that I'd trade in a heartbeat though is my nearly 50 year old ears. Where can I get new ones??

I've ordered a Topping D50 now, which will be added to my Chromecast Audio. I'll be interested to hear the difference it makes. I am tempted to make up my own linear 5V supply for it since I am old-school and don't like the idea of switching supplies anywhere near audio. Something involving a transformer, rectifier, lots of capacitance, linear regulator with heatsink, and a shielded twisted-pair power cable to take the clean DC to the DAC.

Welcome to the board - a growing community To your point about collecting CDs - the similarity with vinyl and CD is they're both physical media. Time was, not so long ago, when you met someone and got invited to their house for the first time, you could check out their CD shelf and their bookshelf to size up what they read and listen to. These days not so easy! Other thing about physical media is I feel it is far better at acquainting the listener with the artist, since you are more likely to listen to a whole album, rather than creating a playlist with one from each artist. (To this point, my teenage kids sometimes wonder why I listen to 5 or 6 songs from one artist in a row!) Anyways welcome aboard.

On my blog I've got a suppliers page which lists my sources. I've used Hammond mains transformers the last couple of builds I've done, for the simple reason of aesthetics. The ones wound by the local supplier are industrial and have no end covers and are simply too ugly. I'd love to use locally made units but they don't pass my acceptance criteria. Also one of them has a mechanical hum / buzz in use, which might be fine in a control box in a noisy industrial environment, but not for audio. The Hammond transformers, while they look nice, aren't all brilliant though. For a start they're more expensive than the locally wound ones, and they run uncomfortably hot. After ~2 hours operation the transformer in my EL84 amp is too hot to touch for more than about 2 seconds. This despite the transformer being used well below its maximums. This tends to suggest a 50% de-rating (at least) is appropriate with Hammond mains transformers. Which has prompted me to look at the Polish Toroidal transformers from Toroidy, although I haven't used any of them yet (waiting for someone else to ask me to build them an amp!) their prices are a little lower than Hammond. I've been very impressed with the Hammond output transformers though. The little 1650s I use for the EL84 amp are clean down to 6Hz. A word of warning - there are lots of cheap electrolytic capacitors around on auction sites and the like... be very careful. A lot of them are fakes and/or knock-offs, which in some cases will actually explode if used close to their rating. I will only ever use capacitors from my top-tier online suppliers, RS and Element14. Good luck with your build. Hit me if you want to bounce any ideas around.

Matter of fact I picked up another pair of speakers and it's also visited another audio enthusiast's place ... I was very pleased with the results Designing and building valve gear is fun. Shame good quality transformers are so expensive else I'd build more and experiment with different designs.

That's a really nice rescue you did on those cabinets. I did something similar to a pair of old KEFs but they didn't come up as good as yours. Regarding your source: For a while, I was using a PC as my main digital source and I thought it sounded OK on FLAC or hi-bitrate MP3. Then I found one of the ancient 1990-era Musical Fidelity "Digilog" D/A converters which I bought for the grand sum of $40 and I ran the optical output from the PC into that. I wasn't prepared for the massive difference in sound quality. Every single aspect of the sound was markedly better. Dynamics, Clarity, Imaging, and the darkness behind the sound. That old clunky black box stayed with me for several years.

Some of us 2-channel nuts are still listening to vinyl, even!

Welcome along. If you've got any questions about vacuum tube stuff in particular, feel free to fling them my way... and yeah some of the old-school gear from the 70s and 80s has a certain unmistakable aesthetic. Seems there's a few of us around the Wellington area.

Are those measurements right? The picture looks like a bit more than 40mm height

My experience some of the coloured vinyls from the 70s and early 80s had more surface noise, but current pressings don't seem to suffer from that problem.

In an earlier thread I posted about the new valve amp I made. (You can read more on it here if so inclined). I've only one pair of decent speakers, my old KEF C95s which it does a great job with. But, I'm quite keen to hear it playing through a few different pairs of speakers and in some different size rooms, etc... so if anyone is curious as to how a 15w valve amp sounds then ping me a PM and let's hook up a listening session. Amp weighs 10kg so reasonably portable, and has line and RIAA inputs (for MM only, not MC) I know... weird request, right? I should just go out and buy more speakers. But I would like to hear what this amp sounds like on a variety of different speaker types. I don't know anyone in the audio fraternity, hence this post. Anyone interested?

Thanks yeah I have a continuous improvement goal with my amps; this is the fourth one I designed and built, each an improvement on the previous. There are a few things I want to improve about this one, specifically: 1) I want to go to independent power supply rails for left and right channels, to minimise crosstalk 2) I want to change the topology to the phase inverter. The DC coupling requires the first gain stage to run at a lower voltage than ideal for the linearity of the tube (I've already re-designed the board for this so I can check this one off... next build will incorporate it) 3) More DC decoupling for the RIAA stage (also, already designed onto the board layout, waiting for the next build) Other than that, the changes I want to make are cosmetic. I'd love to silkscreen the top side of the boards, but I don't have the equipment or knowledge to do that, plus I'd like to tidy the wiring inside a little. To your questions specifically: Power Supply shielding - I decided not to because the transformer has an electrostatic shield, plus there is no switching in this power supply it's all completely linear and unregulated. So there shouldn't be any RF spuriae RF Protection on AC input: With tubes, they have an effect called "miller capacitance" which - long story short - if you add a grid-stopper resistor right near the Grid pin, forms a strong attenuator for RF. I scoped it up to 20MHz and there's nothing going on other than expected harmonics of input signals, there's a dominant pole at 46KHz so I have decided to assume, naively maybe - that RF is not going to be a problem. My NFB has filtering to damp oscillation also. I'm gonna keep refining the design of this one as long as I can find people that want them. This one sounds incredibly easy on the ear to listen to, I've been delighted with the sound from it.

Black adhesive vinyl sheet affixed to front panel. Laser cutter used to etch the outlines of the letters by cutting through the vinyl. The vinyl was then peeled off carefully, then the tweezers were used to peel off the enclosed parts in the letters (like the letter o, e p, d, etc) Then I sprayed three coats of clear lacquer over it to protect the letters and ensure they stayed on.

Been agonizing over posting this here or not. The world is full of EL84 amplifiers - who needs to see another one? I built this for two reasons: To have a tube amp to use while I refurbished my old one, and to have a unit I could surprise people with when they learned what 15 watts per channel can do. Had a lot of fun designing and fabricating the PCBs, punching, drilling, CNC milling and laser-etching the chassis, soldering and testing... this one took about a month of evenings and weekends and represents an investment of $1400 NZ It's the best-looking one I've made so far, and the fastest turnaround. Technical and performance details, schematic, and more photos here. One of these days I'll make something that doesn't look like such a rats' nest inside. The Silicon Centipede is the microcontroller for the remote control... the RC allows remote power switching, input selection and volume control (motor driven). This thing's been pleasing us with its performance and surprising amount of authority it exerts over the fairly inefficient KEF speakers, given its small wattage. It certainly lends credence to the myth of tube watts being different from solid-state watts. It passed the Salmonella Dub test with flying colours. It weighs about 10kg with the big transformers at the back. I don't have any small children in the house so I'm happy enough leaving the tubes exposed but I see most commercial gear offers optional cages or shields over them. The big power tubes get up to around 160ºC Planning to take this to a few peoples' places and try it on various different speakers. I see a few people around building tube gear. wonder if there's enough of us for a get-together/swap-meet some time?

Well, up to a point. Thanks for your kind words but at the end of the day a Chromecast's still just a Chromecast. I would like to have a better digital front-end, but I've been focussing on my vinyl up to now. That and building amps. I need to try a few different things. In the early days of digital I noted a lot more difference between components than there is now, in terms of sound quality. In 1990 I upgraded from a Technics CD player to a Denon costing 3x as much and the sound was night-and-day. (The music grew "corners and edges") Then I added a Musical Fidelity "Digilog" (one of the earliest ones in the black box) and experienced the same uplift again. Now, the humble Chromecast (with my own power supply on it) will easily eat that combo alive. Maybe when I get finished the next amp, I'll experiment with digital sources again... never ending journey

Yep. I run a plex mediaserver at home and ripped all my CDs into it. Around 500-odd. Works well. Streams FLAC files uncompressed within my network and transcodes to 192kbps on the fly for streaming out to the internet. At the moment, I'm just using a Chromecast Audio (with a homebrew power supply) as the client (don't knock it until you try it, these things punch above their weight, and you can also take a diigtal output from them and add a DAC if you want.) The FLAC files sound noticeably better through it than compressed, no surprise there. (You have to make sure you go into the settings for it and enable "full dynamic range" else it compresses the audio suitable for tiny speakers) One thing I don't need is more CDs filling up my environment. I am entirely happy to have local copies of the FLAC files without a physical media to carry them... I save my possessiveness and nostalgia for my vinyl collection. Now THOSE are my treasures!

If I want something with soul, I'll buy the vinyl. If I go to a live gig I'll buy the vinyl - usually in such cases there's a card with a download code, and you can get the download in FLAC or MP3. Having the vinyl and the FLAC is the best of both worlds. I don't much care for having the physical CD though, a FLAC download would be fine for me. I put all that stuff on my media server anyway, then I can stream it. Just seems to be a bit difficult to find somewhere that'll let you download FLACs unless they're on Bandcamp. Which some but not all are.

This has probably been covered many times elsewhere, but here we go again. Today I had a frustrating experience. I decided I wanted to buy an album online. (David Gray's "Mutineers", to be precise) I already have Spotify Premium and I can stream this whenever I like. But I decided I wanted a copy, and in FLAC no less. I don't much care about 24/196 or other HD formats, since my hearing is that of a middle-aged human, not a dog. But I digress. 16-bit 44.1KHz FLACs are just fine by me. Do you think I could find anywhere that would take my money? A couple of years ago, I dug out the 500-odd CDs from the boxes that I'd stored them in back in 2005 when I ripped them all to MP3. I re-ripped them all to FLAC (well, all the ones that over the passage of 30-odd years I'm still not embarrassed to admit to ownership of!). I would have thought "in this day and age" (the rallying cry of animated fossils the world over) it would not be necessary for me to actually go to the store and buy the CD so I could get a FLAC copy. This still seems to be harder than it needs to be. I've built all my own gear and I don't want to be putting compressed audio through it, if at all avoidable!

I've had my big KEFs for about 13 years and I love them. Except now they've developed a slightly hard edge to the treble I don't like. Either the caps in the crossovers need replacing or else the ferrofluid has dried up and it's not damping the resonance as well. Probably a bit of exploratory surgery required I used to own a pair of B&W P6 but the KEFs stomped all over them. In general I find that the choice of speakers, their placement, and room acoustics, will influence the sound you get by 90% and the choice of electronics 9.5% and then the tweaks the remaining .5% but yet it's the tweaks that are the most expensive! I don't understand that.

Quite the system you have there Bodhi... must have taken a while to build that up and fit all those pieces together and work out what works well with each other. I'm just amazed that even now, 100 years into hi quality recorded audio, that we still have so much difference in tonality and so on with speakers. I've got two pairs of Uni-Q KEFs here from the same series, just different sizes, and they sound totally different around the midrange and treble. I'd naively have guessed they'd sound the same, with the bigger ones just going deeper. Not so!