[AthenaZephyrian]

I was fiddling with the gain setting on my Little Dot I+, and it occurred to me that the op-amp was running pretty warm, perhaps warmer than typical for solid states, and that I'd seen people running metal op-amps with heatsinks.

I had a plastic-shelled op-amp, which isn't conducive to heat conductance, and I lacked a true heatsink with a planar base and flanges to dissipate heat, but such thermodynamic limitations would not stop me! Seeing as the op-amp (MC33078n) is unmitigated trash anyway, I glued two small nails to it.

It sounds the same, though maybe a bit less strained--probably placebo. Nothing will change the fact that it's like listening to a hifi-stereo system wrapped in a memory foam mattress, though. Can't wait to hear the tubes with a better op-amp....

So...the moral of the story? If you want your amp to look stupid inside, and sound basically the same, glue nails to the op-amps I guess?

 

[Bmxant]

Your creativity is appreciated I suppose, but you could have purchased a small pack of gpu vram heatsinks instead

I'd be worried about them falling off and causing a short.

 

[AthenaZephyrian]

Your creativity is appreciated I suppose, but you could have purchased a small pack of gpu vram heatsinks instead

I'd be worried about them falling off and causing a short.

You have a point, but I wanted my op-amp chilly, and I wanted it now lol. I mostly did this as a joke. I'm getting a number of op-amps to try in a few days, so I'll actually get a couple of those and see if they make any difference; thanks for pointing that out!

The potential for shorts would be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that the nails are actually hanging from the op-amp when the Little Dot is right-side-up; they'd just fall into the pan/skirt.

Now to try liquid nitrogen... or better yet, closed-loop liquid helium dissipating heat into a high-churn bath of liquid nitrogen.