[vixr]

Pete, cetoole, Tangent, AMB, ???
   nothing?  I have been building your stuff for years !!!
What? You guys are the GODs of DIY!!! 
tomb!!!  You have something to give us!
Where are you guys? I want to start a petition to get the monsters of DIY back here with the next level of headphone amps... Please gentlemen... It's been too long...

 

[jcx]

after the O2 there's nothing left to do except electrostat amps

 

[tomb]

  Pete, cetoole, Tangent, AMB, ???
   nothing?  I have been building your stuff for years !!!
What? You guys are the GODs of DIY!!! 
tomb!!!  You have something to give us!
Where are you guys? I want to start a petition to get the monsters of DIY back here with the next level of headphone amps... Please gentlemen... It's been too long...

Pete must be pretty busy with his Apex equipment, although he still posts a project from time to time on his website.  Cetoole is pretty busy working, but posts occasionally on another site.  Tangent appears to have gotten out of the business/selling side, but he posts here when questions on his previous projects come up.  AMB pretty much sticks to his own forum these days.
 
Dsavitsk and Avro have been working with me for some new stuff - but we've all been pretty busy these days.  Dsavitsk has a couple of tube amp variations in the works, having finished his latest Summit-Fi project, the Black Diamond.  Avro has the DoodleBug which I've been working on for quite awhile.  First we had an issue with the PCB's, now I'm trying to iron out a few issues with the casework, but should be on the verge of releasing it in a few more weeks, I hope.  I'm sure more great things will come from Avro_Arrow in the future.
 
Like you must be, I also get a bit frustrated at reading about almost nothing lately but cabling and headphone mods.  No offense to the people interested in that stuff.

 

  after the O2 there's nothing left to do except electrostat amps

 
 
Seriously, though - IMHO, NWAVGUY did some serious damage to DIY in creating a whole group of minions that naysay any other project - past, present, and future.  Schiit has hurt as well, in coming up with many inexpensive alternatives that require no building.  I hate to criticize them from that perspective, but it's a fact.  Then there's the Chinese ...  Time was when I first got into this, if anyone wanted to have a headphone amplifier - they had to build it, period.  There wasn't anything else.  Those days are gone.
 
It takes quite a bit for anyone to come up with a great design and the rewards have always been small.  These days, the competition is fierce and a lot of the support is gone - look at the Group Buy situation here on Head-Fi, now.  That used to be SOP for DIY.

 

[Jose C]

Ti Kan has recently announced his new reference dac, the Gamma 3. It's not ready yet but the analog output stage is already being tested and everything is looking really good.
He also just updated the Sigma 22 power supply and not too long ago was asking if there was interest in a phono stage.
 
Also there is another site with so many new diy projects that you won't be able to keep up with them
 
The Wire is another interesting project on diyaudio.com
 
There are still a lot of things to build if you know where to look, but I'm afraid the diy friendly times of Head-Fi won't be coming back. All the oldschool members from Headwize went somewhere else...

 

[wakibaki]

No product survives by right. It is not laid down in tablets of stone that DIY designs and kits deserve adoption. The rationale for their existence was never strong, if a single design, the O2, could so seriously upset the marketplace.

It is not true that there is 'nothing left to do'.

The design of custom enclosures is just becoming accessible, via CNC routing or 3D printing.

The O2 was intended to meet a standard of performance affording transparency, and with certain minimum features. It's feature list is by no means exhaustive.

 

[Mullet]

I've been wondering this myself lately. Even if the DIY Gods have moved on to greener pastures, I'd still expect to see new designs pop up and they do but at a slower pace. I wouldn't put the full blame on the O2. There are other factors like going from DIY hobbyist to Member of the Trade. Also, I'd think there is a time to pass the torch to newer blood. I suppose guys like OPC, Avro, and a few others would fall into this category. Hear. Hear. I'd like to see a rebirth of the DIY Gods on Head-Fi

 

[nikongod]

The same thing could have been asked some 8 years ago when the DIYers who were around at the dawn of head-fi started to disappear. There have been threads like this before.
 
But then they taught themselves to design and build stuff. Then they built it. Most of it will suck but it is better to suck at something than just fit in doing more of the same. And it is yours! Be proud of it.
 
There are more than enough designs that have not been built more than a few times if you build off of perfboard or P2P. All the design work is done. Maybe teach yourself how to reverse engineer a design with obsolete/unobtainable transistors, and redesign for available parts, but you don't have to do a LOT to build something so old you can call it new. Even if you get half way done reverse engineering the old thing, and realize something else is better or that this is completely unbuildable (there are some things that just cant be replaced) you will learn a bunch in the process and this will take you to your next project. 
 
It is worth note that there are no fewer than 4 headphone DIY forums. There is here, the "angry forum", the AMB forum, and Alex Cavalli's forum. If you include the headphone section at DIYaudio the community of designers - which is never really more than a few people at a time gets spread REALLLLLY thin. A general lack of money & time in the formerly middle class probably doesn't help things either.
 
Is now the right time to express my disapproval of PCBs? Don't get me wrong, PCBs are great for any sort of assembly line construction, but for DIY work What?! WHY?! NOOOOOOO! Too many people have never had the VERY valuable experience of struggling with a perfboard, trying to get everything to fit, and really getting the circuit in their head. Just stuff and solder. How can people be expected to learn, and pick up the torch when more than half the thinking is done? Yes perfboard and P2P is hard, but its a GREAT way to learn, and the only way to do something other than what was on the PCB....

 

[Mullet]

Alex has a forum for DIY? I wasn't aware of this. Haha, the angry forum... I can only guess. Are you speaking of the famous measurement forum? There's also a forum for DIYers on head case.

 

[Avro_Arrow]

  I've been wondering this myself lately. Even if the DIY Gods have moved on to greener pastures, I'd still expect to see new designs pop up and they do but at a slower pace. I wouldn't put the full blame on the O2. There are other factors like going from DIY hobbyist to Member of the Trade. Also, I'd think there is a time to pass the torch to newer blood. I suppose guys like OPC, Avro, and a few others would fall into this category. Hear. Hear. I'd like to see a rebirth of the DIY Gods on Head-Fi

I got some stuff in my pipeline.
Right now there is a lack of time and money but I
have NDA with a company that has some new products
not used in DIY much yet.
 
USB High speed DAC
Ethernet DAC
 
The rules of this board make it tricky to even tell
people what I have in mind.
 
Cheers and stay tuned!

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Cetoole is easy to find if you know where to look

 

[tangent]

Where are the Gods of DIY? 

 
Dunmanifestin. 

 
 
The world I started DIYing in isn't the one I ended up in at the end of last year, when I shut down my shop. As that world faded away, so did I. (Don't shed a tear for me. I'm fine with this.)
 
Anyway, gods, really? What, I have scriptures now? No, those are just footprints. If you're tired of retracing those footprints, go make some of your own.
 
That's all I was doing, after all.

 

[amb]

Some of us are alive and well, but we've moved on from head-fi mostly because the rules here made it untenable to continue doing what we do. I was on headwize for some time but that forum had a long outage and then went completely defunct, along with many years of valuable posts, info and knowledge. I decided to start my own forum about 4.5 years ago, and as far as I'm concerned, it's for the better. I continue to develop new projects and support builders there, but I occasionally drop in here to read stuff (as I'm doing now).

 

[FrankCooter]

Rather than complain about the lack of new projects, why don't you bust out a soldering iron and create one of your own?
 
It can be very rewarding to stuff boards designed by somebody else, but it's a whole different level of satisfaction to create something from scratch, even if it barely works at all.
 
Once you get something, no matter how crude, take it to a meet. You'll be surprised  at the response. I like high-end commercial gear, but I would far rather listen to a high school kid's $20.00 Radio Shack project mounted on plywood than the latest $5k amp.
 
Pick an area and educate yourself in it. Doesn't matter if it's digital, analog, solid-state, tube, etc.. Build a few simple circuits and share them with others.  After a while, you'll begin to realize that there are a whole lot of under-explored areas in audio electronics and you'll begin to have ideas of your own. As an amateur, you won't be limited by the constraints of cost, size, parts availability, and sonic fads that dominate commercial designs. Seek out and use non-standard parts, explore unusual and alternative topologies, treat the casework as an art project rather than a minimalist afterthought. Accept that most of your work will be failures, but that if you keep trying, every once in a while you'll come up with something that's not only good, but uniquely different from anything else out there.
 
I work on solid-state industrial electronics for a living, but my own little corner of the audio world is DHT amplification. With some small exceptions, there hasn't been a new DHT for 75 years, but there are still plenty of opportunities for creation in this area. I'm sure the same can be said about any other area of audio electronics as well.

 

[COOKIESnPIE]

Post deleted by user.
 
 

 

[Avro_Arrow]

  I'll post the layout (coming soon) and other details in a new thread later on.

 

 
 
I'll wait till then to comment on it...