Bride of Zen on a shoestring

[Peter Daniel]

Since I've been accused on more than one occasion of showing creations that might be out of reach for some members of this forum I present here something that can be easily and cheaply done and looking nice as well. This is BOZ I built for my brother in law.

 

[Peter Daniel]

That's the back panel. The case was bought from my local Chinese store for CAD 30.

 

[Peter Daniel]

The PCBs were done and designed by me. I always prefer to use relay switching mounted directly on input and output connectors, minimum wiring this way and purer signal paths. I used separate transformer for relays. Input potentiometer is 100K Nobel sourced from Sonic Frontiers. The toroid is mounted on a thick copper plate.

 

[Peter Daniel]

Wiring by Kimber, coupling caps from Rifa (Elso should know now how I know they are bright ). The extra circuit here is low pass crossover for subwoofer (Marchant) with separate transformer and PS.

 

[Peter Daniel]

I did that preamp in 2 days, and being seemingly cheaply done I always look at it with pleasure. Maybe because it owes its styling to early Mark Lewinson equipment.

 

[Lisandro_P]

Oh my god, is that AWFUL or what?

2 days eh? I hate you... nah, not really. It looks damn good!

 

[AMPMAN]

peter daniel

peter, how do you get from an rca plug to the pos and neg inputs plus ground, of one channel of a balanced input. in other words how do you get from two hots and ground to one hot and ground?

 

[Peter Daniel]

This is BOZ (not balanced). Balanced BOZ came later. I did this in 1995 or so.

 

[jleaman]

AHem well i have one thing in my preamp that you dont...

murcury wetted relays i have about 400 of them in a box in my shop hehe paps gave them to me.. he didnt need them and said that they are perfect for noise free switching in a pre amp..

so well im using them..

( not all of them but a few.. )


Jason

 

[Peter Daniel]

Can you show me how they look?

 

[jleaman]

Here you go peter

 

[Peter Daniel]

those are pretty big sinks for a preamp. Are you gonna use them for side panels?

 

[jleaman]

yeah that is my plann but i might change it because it is kinda big.. Anthony ordered me 2 toroidials for the preamp witch is what is required but ill have to wait till they get here and then start my preamp.. but all my parts are going to be here VIA anthony next week some time

i got all the caps transisters fets resisters binding postes lots of crap 300.00 worth of junk LOL

J''
then i have to buy toroidals for my aleph amps then caps but for now some money is going on my new apple g4 mac..

: O )

 

[Peter Daniel]

Jason,
I might be interested in getting some of those relays from you, since you got so many.

 

[Peter Daniel]

Some people asked me about the PCB layout for relay switching circuit. No schematic available' but the circuit is easy to figure out. The relays are soldered directly to the traces (on traces' side).

 

[bawang]

This ain't no shoestring BOZ! It's damn good!

 

[Peter Daniel]

It is true that it's looks good on the outside and as I said before it cost me around CAD 40 for case, knobs and switches. Good combination of colors and thought out placement of controls is a ticket to beauty . I call it "on a shoestring", because normally I would use 1/4" aluminum instead of thin sheet metal, 2 separate toroids, more caps in PS and true mono layout.

But this one sounds really good too.

 

[jleaman]

hey i got a question.. since i am building a aleph balanced pre amp the 1.7

will this work..


Input rca's ( from cd player.. )
out put to alephs Balanced plugs
out put to xover for subs then to amps via rca out..

will the amps be in balanced mode even though the cd player is rca non balanced in..

 

[Peter Daniel]

P 1.7 will convert single ended signal to balanced. Since you feed balanced signal to Aleph amp and single ended to crossover from preamp's output you might have to load the negative output (that's not going to crossover) the same way as positive (is loaded by crossover).

 

[Ren]

a couple of questions...

Peter,

Your "shoestring" BOZ looks really good, but your comments brought a couple of questions to mind... well, maybe more than a couple.

What is the purpose of the thick copper plate the transformer is mounted to?

I'm starting to gather parts for a BoSoZ, and I'm interested in your use of relays for signal switching. Any recommendations from relays you've tried?

Thanks,

Ren