Millett "Starving Student" hybrid amp - Page 127

Getters on the top of the tube are referred to as "Halos" because of their resemblance to halos

Hi. Long time lurker, but this is my first posts.

I just finished building a Starving Student, and wow, this blows my only other amp (a CMoy I built) way out of the water.

After a couple of weeks of planning, I found what appear to be the last two 19j6 tubes on the internet from vacuumtubesinc.com. They aren't matched, (one arcturus, one GE), but this is an amazing sounding amp. It makes the low-end on my K271s come alive like I've never heard. It makes me want to listen to some good pipe organ stuff.

I'll post pictures tomorrow. I built it into a Planters nuts can (starving student, eh?).

Starving Pokemon Hybrid

I've had parts for my Starving Student sitting here since the summer and I finally got around to building it. I think my BOM was similar to the Aussie group buy BOM from last summer (so long back I can't remember for sure). Casework took some doing as did figuring how to route everything cleanly in the kind of small space I made for myself. Finished it up about an hour ago, plugged in an old iPod as a source and some Apple buds half expecting to hear nothing, but there it was, beautiful music: Bob James, Diana Krall, Pearl Jam, Dvorak. Wait a minute! Have Pearl Jam and Dvorak ever been mentioned in the same sentence back to back??? Hooked up the good source and my K701s and Wow, not bad!

The case was confiscated from my son. I haven't decided if I'll let him use the amp or not (Hey, he doesn't need an amp for PX 100s and with tubes being as rare as they are...)

I'll probably take some better pictures and post on the Builds thread. I was too lazy to go upstairs and get my tripod and play around with apertures.

The Dvorak sounded quite good. Zeppelin: Houses of the Holy sounding good...

I'm getting buzzing when I touch the volume knob :/ turning it up to full eliminates this? Some sort of grounding issue?

yes 100%.

check ground solder points. Consider grounding pot body.

are the input grounds isolated? if nto then isolate them from the case.

Has anyone tried this amp with efficient headphones? (like Audio Technicas)

Is there a way to reduce the gain further? Something like 2 ... 4 ... 6 maybe?

best regards,
bearmann

well i got down to it and was rushing kinda like got it all done in 20 mins this time i was 100% sure i had done it right. when i powered up i was getting sparks on the right hand side of the heat sink tubes wernt lighting up. whats more onces disconnected from mains it continued to spark for around 2 mins

heres a pic



i am not sure what i am doing wrong here, maybe i killed some parts as its been put together and dismantled sevral times now. ive built a cmoy in the past and thought this was nice step up.

Nothing personal, but a lot of those joints and wires look terrible. I see a bunch of exposed wire, overstripped, and a bunch of cold solder joints. Try to reflow the joints and go over everything making sure its correct (check the schematic).

When I built the amp, I took the schematic and turned it into a wiring diagram sort of to help me out...

ˇˇˇA little messy, but easier to understand component/wire placement

People use Grados with theirs.

x2. I took about 5 hours to draw a wiring diagram and I still took 2 days to put it together. Since it was my first build, it was a mess and I left every lead exposed and long. It worked fine until I closed the lid and created a short.

My Starving Pokemon took most of four days including casework, wiring layout and wiring it up with lots of double-checking that the wiring was correct. I'm sure that mine would have had sparks if I tried to do it in 20 minutes.

thanks for the advice guys, think i'll spend some time after work this evening on it.

This is my copy of RDS's Mini Millet, or most of.

Took most part of the day on case work and the rest of the evening wiring it straight off the schematic.

I have a weirdish problem. When i don't have any inputs pluged in, i can start to hear noise at about 80% on the pot. But once i plug my sound card in, i get a weird buzzz noise at about 45% which by then is quite loud. Straight from the card to headphones are silent.

EDIT. It seems to only buzz when connected to my sound card...i get a plain static noise if i use my iPod which i know is noisy(can hear it unamped through 'fons.)

thanks, re-did some of the grounding points and grounded the pot body and the buzzing has disappeared.

The input grounds are connected to the rest of the grounds, the case is made of ABS.

I am getting a scratchiness as I rotate the pot though....could it be the pot is bad?

Many pots are "scratchy" when you turn them, but silent when you stop turning and are just listening to music.

Sometimes if you work the pot back and forth you can work out the scratchiness, which is, I presume, some oxidation or dirt. With old pots in particular I've had pretty good luck returning them to health by squirting electrical contact cleaner into them and turning them back and forth.