I have posted a few scattered images of some of the projects that I have built but thought I would post a selection of them here. I was bitten by the diy audio bug about 20 years ago when my girlfriends brother-in-law showed off his home built class A amp ( weighed an absolute ton) and speaker setup. It was incredible, I had some intro level audiophile gear and didn't think it possible to build anything that sounded so good.
After building a few amps / refurbishing old tube gear and finally building the speakers I wanted, I found that I needed a new outlet for my restless fingers. I owned the original xcans and HD580's and didn't think I could beat that but when I moved and had to clear out a ton of my gear, I got rid of them in a moment of insanity?? GOK
. I had built a dozen or so tinamp cmoy's for family and friends because they were cheap and easy to put together but never thought of them as worthy competition to the xcans. My first real attempt to challenge the xcans was a xfed opa627 based cmoy followed by a WJ diamond buffer which was powered by a regulated psu. I bought myself some SR60's and rediscovered the fun of headphones. This setup sounded good but it got me looking around at other options to build and earlier this year I found the time and inclination. I had this really thick file covering Gilmore's amp, the Morgan Jones, Borberely - too many bloody choices is what it was and then I stumbled across a few newer designs. In a matter of a few months I had built 3 amps and one of Alf's Alien Dacs. Feeding frenzy for the starved
. The SOHA's were built as preamp/buffer stages for my AMP6 (41Hz) which form part of my lab music setup and they do a fine job at it. The build is mostly standard except that they use OPA627/BUF634 output. They sound great driving headphones too, a worthy consideration for anybody wanting to build a hybrid amp. (I built 2 as my brother was intersted too and it was easier to build them at the same time - named agent orange .) The cases are old switch boxes which I picked up for a dollar. Not as elegant as some of the builds I have seen posted here but they do the job superbly.
My current pride and joy is the Cavalli-Kumisa III. It is the best amp I have heard since the bug first bit! More info can be found on Headwize where Runeight has recently released the details of the amp and AMB is going to have boards made. I was lucky to have been involved in the prototyping and have been truly blown away by the control and depth of this amp. Again aesthetics are not my strong point, but it works for me and I thoroughly enjoy listening to it every evening. The final addition came about as a friend asked me to build yet another tinamp, I figured I could put something small on a circuit board and squeeze it into an altoids tin. The final result was a pretty superb sounding chipamp which uses a split supply, dual opa buffered VG, aph47 type dual opamp per channel and simple diamond buffer within the FB loop. I liked it so much that I built myself one while waiting on Uncle Phil's LisaIII to see the light of day...this madness never stops
..dB
