Finished up 3 builds with dedicated themes.
Used Cardas Quad solder and a needle tip on the iron, might have been set a little high for temperature.
Now have new
Alps RK0971221Z05 potentiometers and these have a D shaft end so needed new knobs that have set screws. Knobs seem identical to what Zishan player uses.
TOP LEFT = Stock
TOP RIGHT = ELNA Silmic II / ELNA RE3 1000uf
LOWER LEFT = ELNA Cerafine / ELNA RE3 1000uf
LOWER RIGHT = Nichicon based
10uf = Nichicon SW
47uf = Nichicon Muse
100uf = Nichicon KA
1000uf = Rubycon ( Nichicon KA 1000uf not shown up yet )
*********Ran into some stupid issues with the
Silmic build.
These trace pads have such a small footprint any messing with them too much or too hot causes a number of problems.
The final fix involved scraping to expose longer solderable trace sections on the backside of the board for 3 leads, and same for 1 on the top of the board.
Routed to front / top with some silver plated Soviet milspec wire leads ( and a careful notch out of the side of the pcb).
Granted yeah, it's certainly not ideal but better than throwing it out
This build was giving me bad fuzz on one channel ( other was perfectly pitch black ) even though all joints appeared to have bonded properly in the 10uf sections. Turns out the culprit was the two 10ufs.
All is well now.
So for some immediate extremely rough impressions with little break-in at all = [ All using JRC4558D opamp ]
Silmic= Extremely natural and powerful, retains a bit of an edge on the top but that may be due to the
RE3 1000uf. Will see how it matures if at all then consider a swap if needed to
Rubycon 1000uf. Silmic II are far too big to fit there obviously.
Cerafine= Seems to be the middle ground between the 3, and if the
RE3 sucks in the Silmic build, then it gets swapped out here for Rubycon also.
Nichicon = quite obviously the most revealing /brighter, sounds good but louder volume usage could be tiresome. That's not a bad signature at all though just quite noticeable vs the natural Silmic II. Thinking perhaps the two
SW 10uf's might be the origin of that.
Next up at some point is the Soviet build.
I'll be duplicating the SD card here so can then compare more after things settle after a bit of running in.
One thing I stupidly busted off the USB female jack So will be adding in a new female at the bottom endplate to plug into any wallwart rather than using some special 2 pin modded one.