THE WIRE conglomerate build thread, impressions and gallery

[nattonrice]

...and a Peter F Hamilton fan too, good form =D

[opc]

Good form indeed... If only every workspace was as tidy and organized as yours!

The boards look great, and soldering is top notch. Thanks for posting the pictures, and you'll have to keep up to date on the rest of the build when it materializes.

Cheers,
Owen

[BuildMeSomething]

Cheers, yep am a big fan of Peter's [including stalking him on FB] and can't wait to get Great North Road

Work area is only tidy because I have to keep clearing everything away afterwards...


My Odac arrived Monday morning fron JDS Labs, and in the evening it got temporarily hooked to the Wire se-se. Once this weekend arrives and I have to time to start drilling holes, it'll find a permanent place here...

O2 or The Wire se-se - The Wire for sure. By the way of frequency response and overall presentation I can't tell the two apart, but The Wire does present much finner detail from source material. For me, if The Wire is giving 100% then the O2 is offering about 98% or so.

Pioneer DV-757Ai (£800 new), Oppo DBP-83 (£600 new) or ODAC (£60) - The Oppo is bettered by both the odac and my lightly modified Pioneer, and for the moment [no AB test] it's a tie between the other two and I'd hate to make a call on which has my preference at this stage. The Odac is very good though.

Paul.

[BuildMeSomething]

Well I spent yesterday [Sunday] afternoon fitting the Odac into the chassis and hooking up switched inputs.

The toroidal transformer needed to be moved more centrally to allow room at the rear of the case for the dac. A 4PDT [on-on] switch was used as an input selector and allows A/B switching between sources.

A small piece of pref-board was used to try and make the job of wiring the input to potentiometer to amp a little easier.

The very small difference in noticed between the Odac and Pioneer [better], apears to have gone now it's fully connected. I'm sure if I try hard enough I can find some subjective difference between the two

Paul

[TiEx]

Today soldered The Wire Se-Se! It was a tough job with thick soldering iron I have at hand. It took me 3 hours to finish the process. Tested finished PCB with DM, and all seems fine. Probably will do real testing little bit later this week.

[Stixx]

To keep this thread going I want to tell you guys that my (assembled) SE-SE board that I got in the 'Clean Out Everything Sale' now has a working psu to go with it.
The rest will take a little while more since I couldn't resist to create a fine case or housing for a fine amplifier (and I haven't even heard it ). PSU will be in a separate case connected by short umbilical... a few weeks from now .

[nattawa]

Finished the project finally! I built the SE-SE TheWire for a difficult customer: a pair of 600-ohm AKG K240DF. My Benchmark DAC1 USB cannot drive them to a proper output level unless I remove the internal headphone amp's 10-db pad-down, but so doing is not favored when I use other lower impedance phones as they tend to be too laud before you begin to turn up the volume. So I decided to serve the AKGs with a separate drive.

I found a gain of +12db (or 4x) works well for the 240DF when feeding the input with 2VrmsFS signal level taken from the Benchmark DAC1 RCA output. The amplifiers never get over driven, and I seem to get the highest volume level that I would like to listen to without feeling uncomfortable with the volume knob pointing at 3-o'clock.

How does TheWire perform? I went through a few albums using a pair of Sennheiser HD-600 on Benchmark DAC1 USB to compare with. I found TheWire made the 240DF produces a glorious yet extremely natural, distortion-free sound when driven to a proper output level, especially when I was playing Joan Sutherland's 1968 Lakme. I never realized Sutherland sounds that good on headphones.

[regal]

You are not alone, a headamp needs the ability to swing at least +15db gain for my 600 ohm AKG sexetts and then the hifimans need 6Vrms into 38 ohms for my HE5-LE's. Hoping the 15W wire version can do this.

Part of it is because of the power hungry hifimans but with the 600 ohm AKG's, you need a lot of gain in order to handle oddball low volume recordings and high dynamic recordings.
There needs to be more focus on high voltage swing and high wattage low distortion headamp designs to cover a greater selection of phones

[bbe]

Finally managed to pull the thumb out of the famous darknes, so now is my Bal-Se finally singing.

So now I just need to get it into some nice chassi, and give it a considerable amount of burn in.

/Bo

[tommy thong]

The Wire with Wood Case