It seems that random acquisitions seem to precede the direction of my inspirations. This has come in the form of a Technics SU-9011 pre amp and a pair of small infinite baffle 2 way speakers. I have no idea what they are, so please share if you do.

The active sony’s, to be honest have been getting me down, they still have a mushy quality to them. The SU-9011 seems to work but was not the happy match with them either. Enter the little 2 ways and my gain clone. Bad.

So I decided to try and power up a little EL86 record player amp which I acquired a few months ago from a friend. This seems to be a close relation to the Mullard economical 3 watt amplifier. To my slight surprise it is in good working order, so with a bit of drilling fitted some 4mm posts and some phono inputs.

With the little 2 ways and the Technics is a lovely combination, real bloom, very enjoyable, and some nice bass.
Technics has “opamps” in, so that gets...

This I have been experimenting - call it a hunch - on the effects of bypassing electrolytic capcitors (Nichicon FW and KW) with 0.1 uF TDK ceramics (Mouser 810-FK28X7S2A104K) with the diamond buffer circuit used in both my B-board preamp and Sapphire headphone amplifier.

This being a mod, I had to solder the caps to the underside of the boards, attached to the leads of the Nichicon 100uF electrolyic capacitors.

I used four ceramics per channel, one per active device in the diamond buffer if you like.

I did several other changes on the B-board at the same time, so it wasn't obvious until I modded the Sapphire in the same way what was the result of the bypassing. Anyway, with both the improvement was immediate and dramatic: any sense of "transistor-like" treble glare is completely quenched. The whole top end takes a step backwards, not in extension, but in prominence.

Less audiophile detail, more swinging mojo.

Update...

Hi, I have just received a 2nd hand 103, (decappitated my 1st one, yes I know I should have had it re-tipped)
Anyway the output is swung to the left. I have a 2 arm system, identical arms and a Clearaudio Beta S in the other) I use the Denon through a SUT and have swapped arms and the is no improvement. Is ther a way to rebalance the output after the SUT say with resistors. I cannot do it after the head amp as the Clearaudio uses this haed amp through a switch box.
Advice, and you thoughs please

I bought a stepped attenuator (actually, two of them) from ebay seller hanshare-electronics. As always with eBay, I was a little worried about what would show up.

I'm happy to report that this is a nice job. The included resistors are clearly labelled, and the documentation, while spartan, is sufficient.

The only negative is the rotary switch is a bit "clicky". Better quality units I've seen are more damped.

On the positive side, though, the resistor values are very elegantly selected, to give a smooth response of about 4 dB per step from -60 to -40 dB, and 2 dB per step from -40 to -3 dB. Having been-there, done-that, I can say that I'd happily pay the asking price to get those resistors sourced and sorted for me. Next time, I'd also pay to get it assembled. Soldering was more painful than I imagined it would be, and the pre-assembled units much neater-looking than what mine ended up as.

B-board vs. 0247.

Comparison of the noise baselines, measured at the circuit output using a NI USB-6215 DAQ. Unloaded for the preamps, and with a 6 ohm load for the 0347 amplifier.

• B-board: -139 [300Hz-100kHz] 0 dB gain (-139 - 0 = -139 dB, 110 nV sqrtHz input referred). The actual B-board output noise is below this measurement threshold.
• 0247: -124 dB [300Hz-100kHz] 14 dB gain (-124 - 14 = -139 dB, 110 nV sqrtHz input referred).
• 0347: -109 dB [300Hz-100kHz] 31 dB gain (-109 - 31 = -140 dB, 100 nV sqrtHz input referred).

See the attached plot for the FFT data. Note the peak at 28 Hz is an artifact of the measurement apparatus.

By way of comparison, a typical audio opamp has an input referred voltage noise figure of 3-8 nV sqrtHz (-170 ~ -160 dB) and can be expected to return this datasheet specification in most well-designed circuits. In other words the output noise is going to be about -160 dB + the circuit gain.

The 0247...

Well, I still need another coat of paint and some crown molding / baseboard, but it's coming along nicely.

The front wall is out about 25" from the foundation, I plan to install 2 Ficar IB318's in there. The EP2000 should be here tomorrow!

Plenty of audio DIYers have discovered what an excellent modding base the DAC-AH Lite is. I'm a latecomer to the party, but better late than never here's my contribution to the art of DAC-AH-alikes.

Most of the mods I've seen focus on the output stage, some upgrade the PSUs. Here's yet another variant - change the DACs. The TDA1545 is pin compatible with the TDA1543 so I swapped out 8 TDA1543s and replaced them with 8 DAC-stacks made up of 5 TDA1545s each. 32 DACs in parallel produce the normal NOS output, the additional 8 DACs are fed from a two-stage delay line (16 74HC595s) to correct for the zero-order hold. I/V conversion is done passively and differential - 1.3ohms in each polarity. The post I/V stage is a pair of AD605s giving a true differential output. In between the two is a passive filter made up of TDK ferrite beads and NP0 capacitors.

How does it all sound? - well of course one is always biassed when describing one's own offspring, but in a word...

If you have a NOS DAC (like a Metrum) and are curious to hear how it sounds with the zero-order hold corrected, here's a fairly simple way to try out my 3-tap filter using Audacity.

Load up the file you'd like to process and make two duplicates (select original and use Ctrl-D) - we'll call them A and B. We need to apply delay and gain to A and B which we do with Audacity's time-shift button (in the group of 6 tool buttons to the right of the transport buttons) and the 'Effects - Amplify' feature. A is shifted one sample to the right, and B, two samples right. I've shown how this looks with a mono chirp signal in the first image.

The gain is input into Audacity in dB so 0.15 becomes -16.5dB and 0.026 is -31.7dB. These are the gains for A and B, respectively. A needs to be inverted too - use 'Effects - Invert'. The second screen grab shows how it looks after these operations (I hid the device toolbar to give more space for waveforms).

Having processed...

Here's a ten discrete tone test waveform played back into my Sony PCM-M10 then FFT'd in Audacity with 512point FFT.

Audacity reports lower freq tones at -18.6dB and the highest (17.3kHz) at -18.9dB - a droop of 0.3dB. This might be in part my passive (LC) reconstruction filter which I have yet to characterize separately. So it appears to work

I'll start posting articles in Persian language, in hope of having Persian visitors