audio-talk

One of those satisfying moments. When you have a great upgrade lurking in your stash :)


Yep, it makes it worthwhile building stuff.
Just upgraded the sound even further with a pair of Voskhod rocket logo 6N23P I found stashed away in a corner of a dusty old box of small signal tubes. These are ...

OK, so the Sowter push-pull output transformers, I had wound around 2007 have been fitted in the HPA. They have 4 bifilar wound secondaries on split bobbins, cost a fortune back then, and to be honest, the difference these things have made to the sound of this headphone amp has been phenomenal ...

Cheers Stephen

I've got a couple of Sowter 3575s, so might put those on the input to see what the effect might be. It's a good sound as is but an input transformer could be interesting.

Here's the power supply for the headphone amp. All very simple:

Push-pull 1626s? Well it’s going to have to be isn’t it.

And push-pull 6080/6AS7s as I have the necessary custom wound Sowter output transformers from around 2007.

Schematic: Inexplicably, I found myself out of LM317 reg chips, but I had a few TL783C, so used 2 of these instead.
I must say, it sounds very good.

EDIT
I suppose, technically this is amp #47. Jeez!

Well, I built the push-pull HPA:

Mounted the “Lazy Man” CCS regulator chips on a piece of aluminium, screwed to the heatsink plate for the Rod Coleman DC heater reg. New tagboard and perspex plate for a pair of B9 sockets too. Power supply simplified to one 470uF followed by R to 2200uF C.
IMG ...

Yes, quite a shock.

Yep,
Everything crossed Ray.

Here's a push-pull headphone amp I picked up on the web. I might try it out or might do my own version with 6H30s. I'll probably build as is to see what it sounds like before going for heftier outputs.

Found a small piece of gold, anodised, aluminium mesh, so made a cover for the raw DC switching supply to the Coleman heater regulator in the box. I’d have preferred silver but it’ll do:

Welcome

Different latitude, I expect.
In unrelated news, for the first time in years, I've bought a pair of off-the-shelf finished speakers...

...Chris

Interesting: about a month ago I bought a pair of Q Acoustics 3010i. These are a small, passive speaker, meant for small rooms and I just love them to ...

+1

Aye, I could have got a notebook PSU in the box, but the only one I’ve got is an 18V one off an ancient IBM ThinkPad; too high.
I’m still on the hunt for some kind of cover for the fugly thing on top of the box.

Meanwhile the 1626 headphone amp is due a refurbish, with purple Rexine applied to ...