A tube opamp hybrid DIY kit?

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Hello guys,

I'm thinking of making a diy kit for a headphone amplifier, based on the fa shmidt yaha design. It's because I can see tubes are becoming more popular these years but not yet in the headphones field.
Anyone here fancies a diy kit including a high quality pcb, quality components such as Dale resistors and Japanese electrolytics, a nice opamp and a plastic case for diy and easy drilling.
If there are more than 20 requests on this I think it might be feasible to have a bulk purchase. The kit would be roughly $40usd, excluding the tube.
Please comment below coz I want to see if there are people like me who can't drag myself out from tube rolling.
 
It's because I can see tubes are becoming more popular these years but not yet in the headphones field.

That's a joke right ? There is at least a dozen of manufacturers of tube amps for headphones and diy tube headphones amps are quite common. Actually, the ancestor of all things DIY for headphones, headwize.com, had mostly tube designs. And Pete Millet has quite a few successful hybrid designs.

I wish you some success with your kit but it might be a good idea to do some market research. Browse through head-fi.org and DIYForums.org as a start.
 
That's not a joke as tube headphone amps are really scarce on the market, except headwise and sijosae, but the majority is still FET and OpAmps.
Tube designs are brilliant on head-fi but they are mostly regarded as experiments more than daily usage.
Moreover, the majority of people rolling tubes are going for loudspeakers but not headphones. Maybe it's the space problem in my country so people who have space go for loudspeakers and people who don't go for mobile devices but merely tubes.
 
Headphones amps per se are scarce on the market, they are a niche product by definition. From past membership on head-fi (I'm a member there since 2002) I'd say that tube amps are largely over-represented.

There is certainly no shortage of commercial offerings, from cheap Chinese stuff to high end. Woo-audio, Schiit, Little Dot, ECP-audio, Cayin, Eddie Current, Audiovalve, Meier-Audio, Ray Samuels, Apex and many others will offer you their products.

On the DIY front, hybrid kits have gotten more scarce recently. But there's still a lot of designs around and ebay is flooded with Chinese PCB. The Bottlehead Crack has been wildly successful as a kit. You can also still get stuff from garage127, Beezar or glass jar audio as a few examples.
 
Talking about Chinese DIY kits they're really flooded. I've seen Chinese copy of Roggom's 12AU7 hybrid and I can tell they're not worth trying unless you swap all the resistors and caps out for at least audio grade ones. The worldwide market though, I can only see the Little bear, little dot and other nameless premade kits. They're basically all sijosae's MHHA variants utilizing Chinese 6N1P, Chinese 6N11 (6922) or Chinese 12AU7 and they're all trash, unless again, you swap all the ohms and caps out.
That's why I had the random thought of asking whether the tube diy heat is still going on in this world, and therefore provide a tester to see whether this brings more people into this diy happy family.
 
The thing is, all the variations using 12Vdc and grid leak bias are more or less trash by definition. The YAHA is far from hifi. I've built half a dozen of those low voltage hybrids and honestly I wouldn't bother anymore.

Hybrids worth building use a higher voltage for the tubes. The SOHA II, the CTH, the various Millet hybrids are much, much better designs and not that much more expensive.
 
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