Just heard the HD598 and directly afterward the Momentums. The Momentums were much better. I liked the Momentums but they were just a tad to laid back for my tastes.    I bought a pair of Grado SR80i's and these were extremely fun to hear. They were just incredible with strings and acoustic...

Hey gang, like I mentioned in another recent thread, I'm just making the switch over from being a 2 channel stereo guy to headphones. I thought I'd be much easier to please with headphones, but that is proving to not be the case. I'm finding huge faults with the 3 pairs of headphones I've tried...

Hi guys,    Just a little background, I've been doing quite a bit of traveling for work so I decided it's time to step up my headphone rig for those long plane rides. For my laptop rig, I've been using an Apogee Duet 2 into a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones (will be upgrading these soon). I...

Wow, this whole time.............   Well, what happens if it sounds good right now? I've compared this DAC to the analog outs on my CD player and the DAC is sounding nicer and more bodied. Hmmm...   Any thoughts?

Thank you for explaining that to me. You'd be the first!    I know for sure that the board doesn't specify (it WAS made in China though, I'm assuming they could forget something like that?)

Are their some caps that don't need to be installed like that? These are the Obbligato Gold Premium caps.    Would be a huge bummer if I had them in wrong the entire time.

Whoa, I'm afraid I don't even know what that means!   Would a kind soul please explain what's going on here? Caps polarized or not polarize? Output caps backwards? Whaaat?

How so? I totally might have done it wrong so if you could be precise when you're explaining how to do it correctly, that would help immensely!

That illustration!    Imagine showing a third grader that illustration and saying "go do it." That's probably equivalent to what just happened when I saw that picture.    So basically, just piggyback 3.3k resistor on the legs of the existing 390R resistor? 

Hmm, I think you're saying to remove my 390ohm resitors which would null my illustration.    Which leads to more questions....

  You're the man. Is this how you do series? 

I've swapped out resistors on my Valab DAC 1 time too many. The traces are not destroyed, but I'm sure one more desolder and resolder session will do it.    I have 390ohm resistors on the output stage and I want to bring that value to 340ohm to 360ohm.    Here are the resistors I have...

Great advice Avro.    I was more wondering if this was technically correct, but it sounds like it is.    Again, thanks for all the help.

Okay, I completely removed the 330ohm resistors and replaced them with cheap radio shack 390ohm resistors.    The original 5600pF silver micas were replaced with 5600pF ceramic discs (it's all I could find!). Is this okay?   I'm letting things warm up before I take a real critical...

What was the guy thinking who told me to take them out? Why would he give me a value of 4.7uF to replace the 10uF caps? I must also mentioned that their were some smaller caps piggybacked on to those big gold obliggatos. (Is that called bypassing?)    Thanks for the help Avro, I'm gonna work...

Hi guys,    This Valab DAC was my entrance into DIY audio (although I forget exactly which version this is, maybe you can tell by looking. The power supply isn't shown in the pictures)   Before modifying this DAC, I had hardly ever used a soldering iron. I've owned this little guy for...