Post pics of your builds.... - Page 248

Maybe if I was a student.

Actually, I have tried my best to get my hands off from too many builds lately and to focus mainly on my β24 power amp, which has been waiting too long to be completed.

Thanks! Regarding a different style of casing... not really, it's one of my favourite enclosure from HiFi-2000 with a 10mm silver faceplate, milled by Schaeffer AG (PFE Germany). The back-lighting knops jazz the amp up a bit.

This was posted in the "Comments on my PCM2702 DAC Layout?" thread - a Cable DAC version I built of the new BantamDAC (BantamCableDAC):

cool, shall that be available as a kit soon??

Nice one, Tom. That's a good idea to eliminate a few unnecessary connections.

My god, its....beautiful.

those are vishay's in 1/4w 1% size from digikey. rn55 size.

sample: cmf4.32kqfct-nd (digikey #)

they sure look nice, don't they? I was careful to align them with all their labels facing up as best I could. takes more time but you build it once and listen to it (sometimes look at it) many times

they are about $0.29 each. not cheap but not anything to break the bank.

As the CMF50's as opposed to the CMF55. They do look nice in blue.

here's tonite's build, fresh off the soldering iron:





its a pimeta (still; but its my 2nd one) with the soic buffers soldered underneath (with NO 220ohm resistors and with 'leg 5 lifted' since this is not a BB BUF chip but the actual BUYABLE parts, lol).

it has the class-A mod, as well.

the rail caps are some nice pany caps that I found at a local surplus shop. almost all caps I use these days say 'japan' or have the 'M' logo on them.

the volume pot is stolen from a 15 yr old broken sony cd player. the pot and motor are still good and the pinout was exactly what the pany 'inline' style called for, so ribbon cable made easy work of it.

I also used one of tangent's power supply modules. the torroid is a dual 12 and I'm using 1 winding for this (so far).

its still far from complete but the guts of it are there and it sounds quite good.

the fun is when I add an IR receiver board and some relays to move that motor/pot. that will be a kick

.bl

what it looks like at this point:



been testing the analog section (PS and amp) and it sounds really great to me. I have no complaints about its sound quality - and so the next step is to install an IR rx module and some switching relays or transistors for the motor. and one more hole to drill to let the IR in. kind of messes up my nice front panel but I need an IR window and so what can I do ..

.bl

Nice case, where did you get it?

Looks like an LMB enclosure, commonly available from electronics parts stores. I've used them quite a bit in the past for small projects. They come in various sizes and shapes.

yes, its LMB:

cr 632 (crown royal)

6.25" length
3.5" width
1.125" height

probably in the $15 range (mine was $10 but it was a few years old and these things go up *insanely* in price).

in action, in one of my equipment shelves:



the setup is a 'mocha' DTS/DD5.1/spdif DAC going into my new pimeta phones amp. from there the audio either goes to the phones or if you unplug the phones, the audio continues on to the behringer a500 amp. that amp drives some maggies (the cheap mailorder $500 pair ones).

I used to have a boring old yamaha 'all in one' box that did all this. now, I have a better DAC, no real preamp (no need), no tuner (no need), all my sources are now digital - and once they get converted to analog they go to my stereo amp or to my headphones. pretty simple. I run in 2.1 mode with a velo. as a sub off in the corner somewhere.

when I added the 'cut the spkrs/amp out' switch to my phones DIY box, I could get rid of the last ugly switchbox I had and now my 'stack' is simpler and less cluttered.

the IR remote in the phono was from an online kits place (I forget the one) and it included the prebuilt IR sender and a bag of parts (not even a pc board) and preprogrammed chip for receiver. that remote has the bottom 2 buttons mapped to the motorized pot for volume up/down. sort of a waste of a multi-button remote, but hey, all it NEEDED was vol up/down


not pictured: a popcorn hour box. its one of the spdif sources to all this and its on the shelf above. also not pictured is a DTV tivo with opto spdif out. that's my other digital source going into the DAC box.

Two Alps RK40s modified into a single 4-gang potentiometer for a balanced amp.