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crazy*carl said:

And despite what people say, I have listened to a wide variety of onboard sound, any almost anything recent sounds pretty good.  If you get to the Pentium 4 era, they start to sound pretty bad.

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Hmm, I have an XFi elite pro with a breakout box and excellent SNR.  I can still hear low level noise and things like platters spooling and heads actuating.  Though only on cans that can dig it out.
 

Well, I've been building PC's for about 15 years. It's certainly possible to have a 100% rock stable o/c. As the above poster mentioned, it just takes ridiculous amounts of testing and stress. I use LinX, for 4 hours or so, it's much more stressful then Prime95, and will spot error's alot quicker. When that has passed, I use 24 hours of Prime95 BLEND. If that passes I use OCCT power supply torture test. Which is a combination of LinX and Furmark, it's absolutely brutal. Putting max load on the PSU, Video card, AND CPU. I only run that for a couple hours. I have not had a bsod since i finished stability testing.. not one. That was a couple years ago now. I'm hardcore when it comes to stability, if I get a BSOD for any reason I'm already tearing my system down to figure out What, because that's not normal, ever.
 
All the above said, I can certainly empathize with someone who just does not want to go though the hassle, the above took me a couple weeks of trail and error, logging settings, what works what don't etc. And it's not something I do to my family's PC's or friends, because it can be more trouble then it's worth.
 
With regards to performance, the difference can be dramatic, depending on usage. If your just doing word processing, browsing the web, and email, it's not going to matter if it's 1.5 ghz or 4.5. If you play games, encode video, or do lots of compression, photoshop, etc it can be a large difference in performance. I'm sitting around a 52% overclock, and the performance seems to scale pretty matter of factly.
 
AMD has made great strides with SLI in the last generation, if you read the reviews you will see that SLI scaling is at something like 90% efficiency now.
 
I have derailed this thread a bit, and it's my fault. Sorry about that guys. This PC talk is pretty irrelevant.
 
Naim. Thanks for your comparisons, also NwAVGuy has some good reasons not to use balanced connections, it's in his blog. Expensive, with no benefit, and sometimes a disadvantage. Also if you like the JDS labs faceplate, they sell it by itself for 10$, should be a super easy swap.

I've been building my PC's for over 20+ now too.  Never owned a prefab PC other than laptops and a IBM PC/XT from the early 80's.
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mikew said:

And it's not something I do to my family's PC's or friends, because it can be more trouble then it's worth.

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That's where my time ends up being sucked.  Fixing other peoples PC's and even the occasional Mac issue.   95% of the time it's user error and I'm just tired of dealing w/ other people breaking their gear and having me figure it out.  I guess it's just really demotivated any desire to tweak around anymore.  There's a saying among auto technicians I know when friends or family come to them w/ problems.  "My car works."
 
Back to the regularly scheduled programming.
 

I will be getting 2 of these from JDSLabs soon, one with the normal gain levels and the other one with 1x/3x gain, should be great!

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anaxilus said:

That's where my time ends up being sucked.  Fixing other peoples PC's and even the occasional Mac issue.   95% of the time it's user error and I'm just tired of dealing w/ other people breaking their gear and having me figure it out.  I guess it's just really demotivated any desire to tweak around anymore.  There's a saying among auto technicians I know when friends or family come to them w/ problems.  "My car works."
 
 

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I hear you there.  Fortunately, for me, it's really never hardware issues that I have to get involved with.  For example, my 82 y.o. mother-in-law has a laptop and periodically, she'll hit the wrong "F" key and turn off wireless networking, or Comcast will have a "burp" and interrupt her service.  Fortunately, she's only 4 miles away.  However, when it comes to the Comcast outages, she busts on them for not having 100% reliability in their service.  I then explain to her how much -- in thousands of dollars, companies spend to have redundant connections in the event one service provider goes out.  She then stops complaining and happily pays her $45.00 a month cable Internet bill.
 
Now, regarding the O2 - I've read and heard about some people opting for a bass-boost addition as a modification.  To me, if the bass boost needs to be utilized, something else in the chain of components needs to be reviewed.  Are the headphones capable of adequate bass?  How about the source player? Is it something like an iPod with a LOD cable?  Or, is it connected via the headphone / out jack?  There are easier ways to cure lower bass issues, too, instead of fiddling with the O2 amp itself.  For example, if one is using iTunes or any other MP3 software for that matter, they could go through their music and embed some EQ adjustments into the songs themselves.  This might seem a bit time consuming - but, to me, it's better than risking an issue by damaging your O2 amp with the addition of the bass boost that it was never designed to have.
 
The O2 itself, is strictly an amplifier.  A great amplifier for the price.  An amplifier that essentially doesn't "color" the sound by altering certain frequencies as they leave your source player.  However, some people prefer a bit more color in the music, and in those cases, just the simple input and output of the O2 might not be enough for them if they're craving some change in the sound. 
 
 

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wje said:

The O2 itself, is strictly an amplifier.  A great amplifier for the price.  An amplifier that essentially doesn't "color" the sound by altering certain frequencies as they leave your source player.  However, some people prefer a bit more color in the music, and in those cases, just the simple input and output of the O2 might not be enough for them if they're craving some change in the sound. 

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I was actually quite astonished at the O2's performance this weekend.   I received my PS for my DAC and the cleaner power just brought my system into the high-end, that is not something I expected with the O2 in my chain.  For anyone claiming the O2 is analytical or thin sounding in any way, you need to come over to my house and listen to this thing in my system.
 
To elaborate, the O2 wasn't a hindrance to the gains brought by the PS.  The timbre, weight, and imaging were truly of a high-end level.
 
I'm still down for the DIY commissioned amp I'm supposed to get in 2 months, but honestly, even if I wasn't, I would be 100% happy with where I am right now.  I will update in 2 months if I feel differently, and hopefully I will given that it the other amp is 6-7x the price.    
 
I'm curious to see what it will add or detract compared to the O2.  To be frank, I'm not of the camp that believes the O2 is a perfect wire with gain.  While I can't find anything wrong with it, I still think I have heard other amps more transparent to the recording, with more spatial details etcetera, so it will be interesting to do the compare.

Im very much enjoying my time with the O2 and the LCD-3. They are a fantastic pairing and the LCD-3 really sings with the O2 with clarity, resolution and PRaT. I would not believe it but the O2 really takes my system to another level altogether.

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wje said:

I
 
Now, regarding the O2 - I've read and heard about some people opting for a bass-boost addition as a modification.  To me, if the bass boost needs to be utilized, something else in the chain of components needs to be reviewed.  Are the headphones capable of adequate bass?  How about the source player? Is it something like an iPod with a LOD cable?  Or, is it connected via the headphone / out jack?  There are easier ways to cure lower bass issues, too, instead of fiddling with the O2 amp itself.  For example, if one is using iTunes or any other MP3 software for that matter, they could go through their music and embed some EQ adjustments into the songs themselves.  This might seem a bit time consuming - but, to me, it's better than risking an issue by damaging your O2 amp with the addition of the bass boost that it was never designed to have.

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Ya, bass boost is a terrible thing.  I hope this never becomes part of the O2 design.  If you want more bass, then get bassy headphones.
 
 

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sphinxvc said:

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For anyone claiming the O2 is analytical or thin sounding in any way, you need to come over to my house and listen to this thing in my system.
 

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It is statements like yours that prove out that the amp is not the culprit in many of these cases.  As I mentioned, the source or even the headphones themselves could be to blame.
 
Also, since this amp is a DIY amp - or, could be assembled by many types of individuals, it's hard to tell how consistent the assembly process has been carried out.  If the assembler is new to DIY and soldering in general, what's stopping him or her from holding the soldering iron on a connection too long and having the heat damage one of the caps?  It is assemblies like that which could present a problematic O2 amplifier.  So, then, we have an individual that comes along and has a moment to listen to the amp - when it's not capably running at spec due to the damaged caps, and they hear a sound variation or weakness.  Then, before taking the time to thoroughly listen to a 2nd O2 amp from another source, they type up some comments about the O2 amp being thin, weak, etc.
 
The purpose of my last paragraph wasn't intended to stir the coals in any way.  It was simply done to point out that many variables are at play here and one build can easily vary from the next by some small deviation in the build process.
 
I do know one thing though, my O2 amp is stellar.  It carries forward the right mix of lows, mids and highs from my source and presents them to me in a great and enjoyable manner.
 
 

Quote:

crazy*carl said:

Ya, bass boost is a terrible thing.  I hope this never becomes part of the O2 design.  If you want more bass, then get bassy headphones.

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Well there's nothing wrong with tone controls as long as they can be turned off.  I think that they're actually a very good thing since if you want to listen at low volumes to save your hearing you'll need extra bass and treble to make it sound natural due to the equal loudness curves.  Personally, I think having some way to change the FR like tone controls or EQ is usually a lot easier and cheaper than getting two pairs of good headphones with different FRs and switching between them or something.
 
Of course something like that will never get added to the O2's or ODA's design because they're supposed to max out the price/performance ratio and tone controls that not everyone would use are bad for that.

To anyone with experience with JDS,
 
I was wondering, does JDS offer the service of changing the gain settings from the default settings according to customer's preference?

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juman231 said:

To anyone with experience with JDS,
 
I was wondering, does JDS offer the service of changing the gain settings from the default settings according to customer's preference?

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Yes, John will change it to your request.

thanks

Just finished making mine with PCB and faceplate from JDSlabs.   Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but it fired up first shot without any problem.  Total time making it was ~ 3 hours and several beers.
 

Pretty good speed. Have you done DIY before?