Arcam Alpha mods

[SimontY]

Haha, I'm taking my time as I've not had the player apart in months and needed to re-familiarise myself with things.

C210 and C214 are coming out as they're unused decoupling for the standard output stage. They'll clear a bit more room for one of the big new caps.

R201 and R202 (12R resistors) are coming out / being shorted as they filter psu noise/ripple and with just one big smoother per rail it will be better without them.

I may place wire under LK3 and LK7 to reduce ground impedance a tiny bit on those links.

I toyed with the idea of feeding the +-5V regs directly from the raw supplies rather than from the +-15V regs as Arcam did it but I think I'll leave that alone for now and gauge the improvement from the new caps and resistor shorting.

[SimontY]

Oh wow guys, this is amazing. I've rarely (if ever) heard such an improvement from top to bottom on every sonic aspect a reviewer could dream up!

I did do the ground and resistor jumpers, which probably was a part of it. Clearly, though, these caps are wonderful as smoothers in this position.

I've only listened to Jennifer Warnes so far and it's so smooth, detailed & open with deeper and more tuneful, detailed bass. The top end is more controlled and the whole soundscape has opened out.

[wlowes]

The reason I cleared the output stage is actually not for the space.

All the components are still in the circuit even if they are not in the signal path. I know it sounds strange, but all aspects of sound quality improved by getting these parts off board even though they were bypassed.

[wlowes]

Originally Posted by AndrewGM

.. time to hook up the valve stage ..
How does it sound ?

Andrew

To me the valve stage is awesome. Very natural, 3D deep soundstage. Powerful from top to bottom. I use 6n2p tubes.

It has inspired me to build a set of OTL monoblock amps based on 6np2, 6np6 and 6C33C... but that is another story.

[SimontY]

Here are the holes are wires I had to put on the PCB to get those big caps in place.

[SimontY]

And here are the caps where I first mounted them... before I reinstalled the pcb and tried to close the tray!!!!!

[SimontY]

To not have to remove the PCB again (means de-soldering clock and signal feeds from the DAC pins) I wound the cap out of the way and glued it down with hot-melt glue.

It's not perfect, needs a bit of tweeking but the tray just about shuts!

[Thomo]

Looking great Simon.

The player btw, not thee.

[SimontY]

Cheers Lee, it does sound well, hopefully you'll hear it again soon.

[AndrewGM]

Brilliant !

So it's a very noticeable jump in sq again and you recommend doing it ?

Andrew