Quote: Originally Posted by AndrewB Just a word to the wise: you should never down-rate (the voltage of)electrolytic capacitors. other than the voltage they work at, there is also what's known as 'inrush' which is a peak voltage surge that occurs at power-up. Under rated component's can...

And make sure the phase is correct.

Quote: Originally Posted by Crowbar Class D... LOL! This is supposed to be a hi-fi forum. When I hear hi-fi sound from a switching amp, I'll eat my shorts. 10 W massive heatsinks? What garbage is this? My Aleph-X are 150 W per channel, and the heatsinks are not massive (especially...

Quote: I thought I was the c0ckiest member on head-fi until i read this! What can I say..? "They say I'm crazy, but I really don't care." Quote: This HS senior supposedly built a working fusion reactor using parts he bought off eBay and from a local hardware store...

Quote: What do you do with a laser spectrograph? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrograph Basically, it identifies chemicals. Quote: Just out of curiosity, what lead you to believe that you are the smartest engineer of your age? Did you win some sort of an international award...

Quote: ^ I thought they used some really nasty carcinogenic stuff called PCB in them, I'm guessing that was banned for obvious reasons ? All the modern caps use mineral or a synthetic oil.

Most oil filled capacitors use some type of mineral oil. However, a few (most notably low voltage, high capacitance types) use special synthetic oils. The oil is selected to have a high breakdown voltage, high dielectric constant, sometimes a high temperature tolerance, and other useful...

I thought I was the smartest engineer of my age until I read this: http://www.hackaday.com/2007/03/16/b...-spectrograph/ What more can I say? About one year younger and at least as smart. More than just amazing...

Will a RC4580 make a good preamp? It appears that my guitar needs some form of high frequency compensation. When I tried using an INA121, the thickest string will be loud while the thinnest string is quiet. Therefore, I plan to use one half of the RC4580 as an amplifier and the other half as...

How much power are you dealing with? At high powers, digital amps are cheaper because the heatsinks and power supplies are much smaller. BTW, for the very first project, I recommend something based on some high power opamps powered by a wall wart. Later on, you can DIY a digital amp but the SMD...

I have a guitar connected to the aux in on my Live 24 bit though a simple opamp based preamp. A digital amplifier is connected to the S/PDIF output. Capture works great but how can I pass though the guitar signal to S/PDIF so I can have an easier time optimizing the preamp circuit? The system...

Home Depot? Lowe's?

What circuit do you recommend to connect a Squier Telecaster Custom 6 string guitar to a line level input on a PC? I've heard that guitars tend to have poor SNR (so frequency response is much more important than SNR for the preamp) although the Telecaster has shielded pickups and therefore has...

Quote: Originally Posted by Torm I run a phase change cooler on my FX57. Trust me - you dont want to cool anything audio with such a beast unless you have a really long cord and is doing the listening in a different room! So use a Peltier with a fanless heatsink or watercooling...

Note that lots of very sensitive analog circuitry (like low noise amps and CCDs in professional video cameras) are active-cooled (usually with Peltiers) to reduce noise.

If it's fine, probably not, or at least not much. If the existing cable is breaking, then it will improve.

I always download and watch when there's really nothing else to do. Then I'll have something to do while waiting at a restaurant, riding a bus, etc.

Even MOSFETs benefit from active cooling. Did you know that you can get over a 50% performance boost on a Pentium D 805 with compressor phase change? And Pentium Ds are CMOS!

Quote: Originally Posted by Garbz The Johnson–Nyquist noise formula is (4kTRB)^1/2, where k is boltzmann's constant, T is temp in kelvin, R is resistance, and B is bandwidth. Unless you can super cool the resistor it won't make a difference, and the fan will most likely be louder...

Has anyone tried to use active cooling devices (such as Peltiers and compressors) with audio hardware? As temperature is reduced, Johnson-Nyquist noise decreases significantly. For a small device like a DAC or headphone amp, the cheapest option is a Peltier. You can buy one for just $20 at...

Nothing during the summer (keep the thermal resistance low!), whatever's needed during the winter.

Why not build a Flash memory FLAC player instead? Flash memory contains no moving parts and is therefore silent.

Quote: Originally Posted by redshifter except when the female jack becomes loose, then you have fidelity problems. In all my experience with electronics, I never had a female D-sub connector become loose. However, I have enountered bent/broken pins in male connectors several times.

Quote: Originally Posted by Uncle Erik You know, there's a discussion of male and female jacks going on in the DIY Forum. I'm still wondering why the use the terms "male" and "female" with electrical connectors. In my experience, the males are usually more often troublemakers than...

Quote: Originally Posted by Wodgy It's time-limited 128kbps WMA protected. Not only won't it play on iPods, but you have to watch a certain number of advertisements every two weeks or your files get deactivated. Use S/PDIF from one sound card to another and re-record the files...