[qusp]

well guys, sorry to say, if you blink, you'll miss it and it is PCB only. Today opc the proliferate and consummate designer of the popular 'the wire' diy headphone amp and power amp series announced a new design which is basically the BAL-SE wire on steroids and , with an instrumentation front end using 3 x lme49990 and 8 parallel lme496X0 buffers per channel in the output stage. it is promoted as a low power power amp, but im banking on it being pretty much the perfect amp for HE-6 and other low efficiency headphones. you know, the ones people are often using ill suited speaker amps to drive?
 
all i can say is
 
 
sorry =D if you were too late, i judge it at 39 boards out of 50 gone, i'm sure opc will keep a few, so given you need 2 boards i figure there is maybe 2 or 3 sets left as of this moment. Less than 24hrs later; there were no kits, just pcb only. its not a cheap build due to all those high performance buffers. probably about 500 for the set before casing or volume, connectors etc. its fully integrated with psu, heatsink and transformer onboard
 
I got a pair to drive my tweeters, as did several others, but i'll probably bring it along to the next headfi meet.
 
noise floor is mostly 147db down with a few harmonics peeking over 130 and thd is immeasurable with an audio precision system. those who know specs will know that for an amp of that power thats just nuts!!  it will drive 15-20wpc into 8-9ohms 
 
good luck!!
 
 

 

[qusp]

mods, tell me if this is out of line, i figured it was ok, its 100% diy, only 4 x pcbs left at the time of my posting, no kits, nothing in it for me, nothing in it for opc, just sharing a totally over the top diy amp project and those who have built his other stuff including myself can attest to the superb SQ and sound science
 
its a beast!! this is one channel
 
 

 

[qusp]

I just didnt want to be the only crazy person using it for headphones on occasion haha, common whos gonna step up?

 

[bcg27]

I jumped on a pair of pcbs

 

[qusp]

Quote:

I jumped on a pair of pcbs

nice  

 
the plain bal-se version with just a pair of buffers has hd600 by the balls, i can only shudder to think what this will do. the cool thing is for headphones you can simply add buffers as needed as they are in parallel; so you can run 2 ->8 buffers as need and/or budget allows

 

[hochopeper]

Quote:

I just didnt want to be the only crazy person using it for headphones on occasion haha, common whos gonna step up?

I'll build mine and may do a test run through headphones for a laugh and also because I can. BAL-SE should be sufficiently insane enough for me on day-to-day basis! 
 
Next Brisbane headfi meet shall be well stocked for diy representation I'd say