Modding a Silverstone EB 02 - caps and psu (T-amp mods)
Greetings, folks.
I very recently picked up a Silverstone Ensemble EB 02 in an alluring black-anodized aluminum chassis. (Actually, I had to pick up a second, since the first developed a sketchy channel that wouldn't pass audio until a very high level signal was fed to it, and then it would be more distorted than the other channel - I'm guessing the problem was on the amp chip, so this is my second EB 02). What I've heard from this amp so far has been excellent, and the amp has gobs of current from its robust power supply, even though Silverstone looks to have taken a stock T-amp board and simply placed it in one of the great-looking aluminum cases the company is famous for. I'd like to play with a couple upgrades to this unit, and was wondering if the more experienced amp folks could weigh in (since my area of expertise is speakers, not electronics).
I know the first thing most people like to do is change out the ceramic input capacitors, and I've seen recommendations ranging from Black Gate to Obbligado, with some brands like Mundorf becoming impractical due to price. I personally like the Obbligados. I don't think I intend to muck with the capacitor values. Would a similar result be gained from 'bypassing' the input caps with small-value (.01 uF or smaller) but very high quality caps?
The second thing is that while the 60-watt Fortron-Sparkle power supply is pretty decently quiet, I'd like to experiment with another possible way to minimize PSU noise - essentially putting a lowpass filter in line with the DC input. Would it be possible to use a shunt capacitor across the amp unit's DC input that would shunt HF noise back to the PSU ground while still enabling the supply to provide DC voltage at the amp board? Or would I be in danger of blowing up a cap or burning out the PSU (which I think is short-circuit protected)? Would it be better perhaps to put an I-core inductor in series with the input? Or maybe both? Also, would the capacitor used here need to be expensive or would a cheapie Dayton MP cap suffice?
Thanks in advance!
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Taterworks Audio (nothing for sale)
Last edited by Taterworks; 13th June 2010 at 09:49 PM.
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