Can DIY be Audiophile? - Page 2

It's difficult to find a commercial tube amp without an equivalent DIY somewhere on the web. The exception might be the micro-ZOTL from Berning ?

 

The same holds true for preamps and power amps, would it be SS, tubes, class-d.

 

The area where DIYers are clearly lagging behind might be the most advanced digital stuff, especially when programmation is involved.

I think 3 is meant to read "good tolerances on components" I'm not 100% sure Id agree although it is helpful. 0.1% parts dont make a piece of hi-fi gear, a good design does. Food for thought: 10% parts are matched better than most analog volume controls. Id certainly do better when its easy enough, but dont get hung up on this one.

 

I'd disagree with PCB's. They are helpful, but totally unnecessary for many designs. If you cant make a PCB yourself you are limiting yourself to "stuff other people like" and other peoples' decisions about how an amp should be built. If you can make a PCB you are officially AWESOME. There is a LOT of very good sound to be found in amps that people dont commonly build because nobody on head-fi point-to-points anymore. 

 

Good basic design is open to a lot of interpretation. SS with more than 40db of global feedback & only a little distortion VS Tubes with no global feedback for example... both can sound VERY nice.

 

Ooh, and DIY gear can most definitely be hi-fi. Quite a few hi-fi companies were started by DIYers who liked to tinker, tried something unusual or unconventional, and found something neat.

 

nikongod is correct that many people don't do certain projects because the can't point to point.  I put my hand up and put myself in that crowd.  I *love* seeing good point to point work.  It is an art, that is unfortunately dying.  I probably help kill it as I'll get a PCB made before doing point to point.  I should really learn.
 

 

 

We're arguing over semantics here.

 

It's not that someone couldn't make a DIY equivalent.. it's that no one, AFAIK, -has-

And therefore, a DIY equivalent doesn't exist.

 

I never said that it couldn't exist.

Yeah, probably semantics, simply how in-depth do you really want to get into "equivalent" - sure, lots of commercial gear hasn't been fully cloned into "DIY", and lots of "popular for the public DIY" hasn't been made into commercial gear - is that really what an "equivalent" of a commercial gear be - a commercially available amp cloned or copied enough into a DIY project that's popular?  As the thread I linked to clearly shows, there have been DIY designs, similar to the Zana Deux, it just didn't get very popular.

It's not totally about PCB, it's the layout.  The same thinking needs to take place for point to point.  PCBs, however, do have some advantages that can't be done easily with point to point....DACs.  Differences between good layouts are hard to discern, but can be done with measurements.  An example of a bad layout would be criss-crossing wires for every component.  Sometimes, when you open a point to point project and take a look, it appears like a bomb went off and wires are all over the place, probably acting like antennae if the case was not shielded.

 

You can see some of the thinking if you read the r1 regulator thread....one of the few design threads in these forums these days....very sad.

Yes, DIY can be audiophile. There are a couple of main reasons:

1. You can buy whatever parts you want and go overboard on things that are too expensive to put into commercial gear. For instance, you can build a dual mono power supply which is rare in commercial gear because of the cost.

2. The circuits have been gone over by a bunch of geeks. If there's a flaw in the design, it gets pointed out and fixed. Commercial gear only gets a few eyeballs looking at the design. Sure, commercial gear can be excellent. But DIY circuits get a much more rigorous examination since they're open projects.

The place where DIY falls down with the average consumer is in the casework. Commercial designs (generally) have much more attractive casing. And attractive casing, sadly, is what sells a lot of products. If someone was selling a gorgeous Beta22 case you could simply drop the boards into, many more would own them.

i also think it needs to be pointed out that diy does not always save money, especially if you take time into account. the beauty is in getting exactly what you want, with exactly the right amount of gain and spend money where it matters to you. it can most certainly be high end, and can be as audiophile crazy as you like. it can be ore high end than any commercial offering, you just have to look at the diy rendition of the T2 by Kevin Gilmore and friends, or some of the crazy phono preamps by sjostrom the qsx mkII RIAA

 

 

Nelson Pass's beast with 2300 jfets is an effort to singlehandedly rid the planet of the last of the sought after toshiba 2sk170/j74 

 

 

 

syn08's HPS 4.1 RIAA phono pre

 

 

and the 4.2 version in smd

 

 

and i would say the projects i'm working on at the moment qualify

Edited by qusp - 3/9/11 at 12:18am

Your link has like 8 posts.

As far as I know, regal never created the amp.

 

Perhaps I am blind.

Can you direct me to the design for the DIY amp?

 

 

 

Between the effort left in reverse engineering the amp and building it anyone who could could design and build their own thing! I guess I speak for myself, but Id prefer spending my time on my own design to selling myself out as an underpayed solder monkey, which is what cloning amps amounts to IMO. Once you get into the real fun of modifying designs you get into the "well its kind of like what its supposed to be, but not, but kind of like not, kind of like mayby. and then you made it a hybrid amp by adding a CCS somewhere, and SS rectifiers.. may as well have made it without any tubes!" 

 

If you want to hear one just buy it second hand. Sell it down the road for exactly what you payed and be happy exerting no effort owning the amp for a few months. Building one is still 0$$$ (per DIY rules here, and basic morality knocking off a currently available amp from an upstanding MFR), but you have minimum of 40 hours of work to do to make that thing function.

 

Regal is/was VERY anti-6c33 & anti-global-feedback which Im guessing would make building an amp like the zana-deux about as fun as having a job you dont like. For no reward. The thread was great as a learning exercise. 

Edited by nikongod - 3/14/11 at 1:01pm

 

 

Holy crap, what is that Nelson Pass design?!?  Must know more about it!
 

The beast with a thousand jfets ? check this: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/pass-labs/150048-beast-thousand-jfets.html

 

That reminds me in a way of how Grado made a speakers with dozens of headphones drivers

Wow, thanks, I read the whole thing....

 

The Grado speakers intrigued me, so I had to look it up too.  I never would've thought that someone would make a line source array out of headphone drivers....  Makes sense though!  It certainly would be expensive to DIY though.