Soha amp good for beginner?

[greatpratt]

Hello, I am interested in learning a bit about electronics and building my own equipment. I was wondering if the Soha amp would be a good amp to start with or would it be better to start with something simple like the cmoy and move up from there.

I have basic soldering skills but thats about it. Glass Jar's kits look pretty all inclusive.

Thank you for the information.

 

[synaesthetic]

SOHA is a pretty good beginner project thanks to the Glass Jar kit. You can find instructions on how to build the amp here:

mb3k.com the place to be

I would not recommend it as a first project though, I would say build a CMoy or a PIMETA first because there are very few things that can go wrong with those builds and troubleshooting them is fairly easy. The SOHA has a lot more involved, including working with dangerous mains voltages on the power supply side.

 

[FallenAngel]

SOHA is not a bad amp for beginners, but in getting a kit, you won't learn much about building electronics. That's the only reason I recommend building a CMOY on perfboard and understanding what each part does, how they go together, board layout, reading schematics. It's harder to do that with a kit (part picking is half of the exercise) and you can practically skip the "understanding" part by blindly following part placement instructions.

This really becomes evident when you have to troubleshoot faulty builds, then you learn everything

 

[synaesthetic]

As a somewhat experienced builder I love kits because they save you tons on shipping. I had assembled a BOM for the SOHA before I discovered Glass Jar Audio and it involved sourcing components from four different vendors. That's a lot of shipping charges!

I recently spent a good long time putting together a BOM for a low-cost wall power PIMETA and put a lot of effort into sourcing every component that wasn't locally available through one other supplier besides Tangent's audio shop. It was not easy and took me several hours of searching Digi-Key's website and catalog. But now that I have it I can reuse it any time so long as Digi-Key doesn't go out of stock on anything. =)

 

[rds]

Yeah, parts shopping for my PPA/STEPS build was painful, but a good learning experience I guess :/

 

[greatpratt]

Thank you for all the suggestions. I think I will start with the cmoy and learn from there.

 

[synaesthetic]

A CMoy is a fine first build; it was what I started with, though mine was a wall-power CMoy using a simple voltage regulator to clean up a generic wall-wart from a cordless phone charger. Considering how cheap it was to build it sounded pretty darn good.

 

[regal]

I don't recommend the SOHA for a first build. Several of the PCB's were made with shorts and traces you have to cut. Also there isn't much support. The Millet Hybrid is a much better first project . The Millett was my first amp build, I would have never had a chance with the SOHA as a first build.