TSEC's Eminence Beta-15A Speaker CAD (Cardboard Aided Design).

TSEC's - DM2 Oscillator Before Refurbishment.

Here's a photo of TSEC's recently refurbished Lyons Instruments 'Interlab SQ10' Oscillator.

Here's a few photos of TSEC's - RADIATION Reverb.

The DM2 oscillator, under inspection by Matilda, at TSEC.

Unsatisfied with the sound of my gainclone amplifier, I re-used the enclosure and the power supply for a gainclone along the lines suggested by Bob Cordell, whose implementation of an LM3886 based amp was praised by at least one member on the NJ audio society.

I skipped both the Klever Klipper and the toroidal air core output inductor, and kept only 10,000 uF per rail in the PSU. The schematic can be found in Chapter 27 of Cordell's Designing Audio Power Amplifiers. The PCB was designed to re-use the existing mounting holes of the ChipAmp's PCB.

The result? Better than with a plain vanilla chip amp, but still not good enough for music. Perhaps I should not have limited myself to re-use of the PSU et al. but should have taken all the details of my implementation seriously.

I posted some time ago a note about my Velleman K4040 amplifier. The sound of the amp as built from the kit was unremarkable and definitely not in line with the price. Lacking experience with tubes, I was looking for some time for well documented mods to the kit.

I found two 2006 posts here and here and implemented them rather directly. The only difference is that I used IXCP10M45S instead of a pair of J508 current sources in each channel and replaced the 1N5408 rectifiers with UF5408 instead of adding noise suppressing capacitors in parallel to them.

The mods did not leave much of the original Velleman design in place; the result, however, is a remarkable improvement in sound!

However, two problems remain: (1) I got hum that wasn't present before the mods; and (2) a two-year old running around doesn't get along with eight hot, attractively glowing tubes. The project is shelved until a better time.

For future reference: The toroidal...

Where is all this going I hear you ask? What's his point? Well to tell the truth I don't hear anyone asking this - the comments sections are remarkably empty save for jkeny egging me on

So here's my point, and its a single word: convergence. Convergence is coming to digital architectures - indeed its already here, just the majority of people have yet to notice.

The diverse marketplace for embedded processors is rather similar to the market for home computers in the early to mid-1980s. It was hard to make the choice - Acorn, Sinclair, Apple, Commodore, Atari, Amstrad, Dragon? Then convergence arrived in the shape of the IBM PC and those brands (with the exception of Apple) were relegated to the history books.

It took quite a while after the 1983 arrival of the PC for this to occur. I had an Acorn Atom which I built from a kit in the long summer vacation after I graduated, and I didn't make the jump into PC-land until the early 1990s. It wasn't...

After a long weekend , i have finished the external PSU!









Here are some internal view pictures.

On the upper side the two +/- Power Supply Modules,
in the lower left corner the 10H choke on amorphous cores from AE-Europe,
in the middle the 1st cap (3,9µF Mundorf supreme silver in oil) of the HV-PSU line,
in the lower right corner the Power Switch Module with onboard solid state relays.



And some close-up pictures

...