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"Tengu" - extreme MC phono preamp

After building the Boozhound Labs MM and dedicated MC stage featuring the Russian PIO caps, I was inspired to build an extreme version of the MC stage. I was very impressed with the performance of the MC stage built from a kit. Having at hand some ultra expensive Audio Note (AN) caps, I thought what better use.

The AN are silver foil, paper and oil clad in a pure copper outer. The leads are fine silver wire and the caps currently sell for AU$427 each! To further ensure this was going to be a "killer" build I added Vishay resistor, Nichion electrolytic caps, solid copper high-end RCAs and a Hammond enclosure. All hook-up wire is silver plated fine copper and solder is WBT silver solder.

Construction is on Veri-board, there is a battery test point at the front and a soft blue "ON" led. On an initial listen the bottom end appears a little richer and the sound stage more defined. But early days. The cost of parts is over AU$1000! "Tengu" are Japanese mystical creatures let's hope this has a mystical sound to compliment the price.
 

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After building the Boozhound Labs MM and dedicated MC stage featuring the Russian PIO caps, I was inspired to build an extreme version of the MC stage. I was very impressed with the performance of the MC stage built from a kit. Having at hand some ultra expensive Audio Note (AN) caps, I thought what better use.

The AN are silver foil, paper and oil clad in a pure copper outer. The leads are fine silver wire and the caps currently sell for AU$427 each! To further ensure this was going to be a "killer" build I added Vishay resistor, Nichion electrolytic caps, solid copper high-end RCAs and a Hammond enclosure. All hook-up wire is silver plated fine copper and solder is WBT silver solder.

Construction is on Veri-board, there is a battery test point at the front and a soft blue "ON" led. On an initial listen the bottom end appears a little richer and the sound stage more defined. But early days. The cost of parts is over AU$1000! "Tengu" are Japanese mystical creatures let's hope this has a mystical sound to compliment the price.

my god i love this , audio porn
i wish i could hear this. fantastic taste sir
 
my god i love this , audio porn
i wish i could hear this. fantastic taste sir

Just spent 6 hours listening to it with my new tube MM stage at a mates place. We both agreed it was very good though new. He has massive new quad speakers and the clarity and warm came through. Happy so far. Long way to go.
 
Last edited:
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Joined 2015
A couple of my homebrewed amps - why not build one yourself?

Here are two power amplifiers I constructed one or two years ago, and I think some may find them interesting and perhaps decide to build one for themselves.
Many DIY people use to build clones of Nelson Pass' amplifiers, such as the Aleph, and some of the First Watts. The first one is a mosfet construction that I call the NDH amplifier ( I have forgot why, but the name is good enough). With this one, I was inspired by the simplicity of Nelson's amps. He seems to like to use drain output constructions, probably since it's a good way to make things simple. I decided to build a source follower and make it as simple as possible, and this is what came up. I like source followers for various reasons. One is that the damping factor can be made quite high without using a lot of feedback. So it should be suited to drive speakers with a difficult impedance curve. I really like the sound of this one and perhaps some of you will find it interesting enough to build one for yourself.
Here is a link to google drive:
https://drive.google.com/folderview...hhNWNsQ0xuelFDeWZMZTFONmg0bUJzMGc&usp=sharing
I have uploaded detailed description and also PCB layouts.


The second one, which I call "Amp667", is a mosfet/tube hybrid, but I will post it under this thread anyway. This one is also made with simplicity as a goal. A single ECC83/12AX7 tube does the voltage amplification, and some mosfet's delivers the current. I think the circuit is a bit unorthodox, but after I managed to iron out some flaws recently, this one is now my favorite.

Read about this one at my very simple site:
- Embuddy
You can read about my other projects. Most of them are in English, but if not you may let google translate it for you.

If there are any project that interests you, you may build yourself a copy. You are also welcome to email me about details ( my address is on my site). My most ambitious project, which I call "Amp1" is definitely something that I encourage people to build, but it is very prototype-ish, but if there are perhaps two or three of you who would like to build it, I certainly will tidy things up, such as documentation and PCB's and so forth. This thing is currently documented in Swedish, but as I said, google may give you a hint of what it is.
 

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