Your Results After Bettering Your ALeph(s)

[Mark A. Gulbrandsen]

With all those "Top Ten Ways To Better Your Aleph" I thought a thread to post the results would be a good idea for those that tried some of them. This way they won't get burried in the other thread..... This way we can share the results and perhaps see what actually makes some big and perhaps worthwile inprovements.
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Here's my most recent addition to bettering my Aleph 2's........

I recently added a film cap 1uf-100 volt across the zeners in the input stage current source.

The noise floor definately got a little better, but thats about it so far. Perhaps a bit better imaging as well, but overall not really that much change in sound. No turn on thump at all and no change in the very slight turn off thump.

Mark

[Peter Daniel]

I know that some may not take it seriously, but this is my latest improvement to Aleph X. I was using some hard plastic feet and I started experimenting with different materials. It appears that the best sound is achieved when under 2 front feet I placed a strip (3/8" thick) of cedar wood and in the back, acrylic blocks directly between chassiss and solid oak floor. With that setup, I have the most pleasing vocals, with natural ambience and 3-dimentionality.

My other improvements in Aleph consist of Jensen copper foil coupling caps, paralleled with silver foil caps (big improvement comparing to other caps), removing 10p feedback cap (I think I heard improvement), removing active curent gain (again, improvement, but not as big as I expected), placing Vishay S102 resistors in feedback loop (some claim that Vishays are the best around, but eventually I replaced them with Rikens, as they add more life to music; this again is important area to experiment and differences can be big).

[Panelhead]

Peter,
They are getting hard to find, but I tried all the Jensens and ended up prefering the tin foil of the copper foil. I am way too cheap to try the silver. Someone commented that it is the mass that makes the tin so good.
A year ago or so AN UK was closing them out for about 5.00 each.

George

[Peter Daniel]

I wasn't really that much impressed with Jensens, but they were better in this application than MIT RTX and Hovlands, and I had all those caps at my disposal. The silver ones are 0.022 and I bought them from Partsconnexion at$16 ea. They not always improve things and in some speaker's crossovers I actually didn't like them and prefered Hovlands as bypass in the same value. But without them Jensens wouldn't be good

[Panelhead]

Originally posted by Peter Daniel
I wasn't really that much impressed with Jensens, but they were better in this application than MIT RTX and Hovlands, and I had all those caps at my disposal. The silver ones are 0.022 and I bought them from Partsconnexion at$16 ea. They not always improve things and in some speaker's crossovers I actually didn't like them and prefered Hovlands as bypass in the same value. But without them Jensens wouldn't be good

All my prior use of the Jensen's has been in tube circuitry. I suspect they work better in the higher volatge, higher impedances, and lower currents found there. I have read that they sound poor in most solid state applications.
I am going to try some different looking stacked film caps I found surplus. There is a range of them, anywhere from 0.1 to 2 ufd and 100 and 400 volt. They are rectangular and some I found were marked as Siemens. The material is silver looking plastic with a lead on each end.
They have metal plates at each end that are conductive. Some I found are coated to insulate all over, and some are only coated on the conductive ends. But most are uncoated.
I purchased them to use as decoupling cap bypasses because they look like very low inductance and fast. But am tempted to try them as coupling caps also. The 2 ufd 100v models I found look like they might be very nice it several of my pending projects.
I found them at all three electronic surplus stores that I frequent, they must very common. Has any one used these? Are they worth the 0.25 cent to 2.00 I paid for them?

George

[till]

Sorry, I don´t have any aleph to make better.


But i thought what is good for an aleph can´t be bad for a Zen! So i read Nelson list of recipes how to improve an aleph, and thought which one would be best to try first.

I came to the conclusion the most intelligent way is to try No. 7) - because it would give me some additional value for myshelf.

The result is that overwhelming i can only suggest everyone to use it. I wonder why it is not at first position on Nelson list.