If I put my notes here, I might be able to find them again later!
RJM Audio in 2017 [modular simplicity]
The time of year where I like to draw up some plans for the next 12 months.
This year’s output looked something as follows,
At the end of all this I find myself sitting on four different voltage regulator circuits, several variants of the transistor output diamond buffer, five phono stages variants, and a couple of nebulous ideas about developing a discrete voltage gain amplifier.
I'm considering how to package this all up in such a way as to best appeal to diyaudio builders of widely varying application needs and skill levels while keeping a simple and logically consistent product lineup.
The basic units I'm looking at are,
[voltage regulator] [voltage gain stage] [small buffer / line driver] [medium buffer / headphone driver]
On one hand I could make separate boards for everything. On the other hand I could have modular layouts as electronic files and copy-paste common configurations together as single boards for manufacture.
I'm not a huge fan of mix-and-match to be honest. It just confuses people and leads to excessive clutter.
So with that in mind I will work on the following,
This year’s output looked something as follows,
- Lowering the noise floor by shielding the power transformers of my Sapphire3 headphone amp (and eventually replacing them with Triad VPM shielded toroidal medical transfomers)
- Developing the CrystalFET phono stage.
- Developing the the VSPSX and bboard 2 to the point of getting the boards fabbed.
- Tweaking the Sapphire3 headphone amp slightly to use as a preamplifier.
At the end of all this I find myself sitting on four different voltage regulator circuits, several variants of the transistor output diamond buffer, five phono stages variants, and a couple of nebulous ideas about developing a discrete voltage gain amplifier.
I'm considering how to package this all up in such a way as to best appeal to diyaudio builders of widely varying application needs and skill levels while keeping a simple and logically consistent product lineup.
The basic units I'm looking at are,
[voltage regulator] [voltage gain stage] [small buffer / line driver] [medium buffer / headphone driver]
On one hand I could make separate boards for everything. On the other hand I could have modular layouts as electronic files and copy-paste common configurations together as single boards for manufacture.
I'm not a huge fan of mix-and-match to be honest. It just confuses people and leads to excessive clutter.
So with that in mind I will work on the following,
- A line buffer solution (no regulators) [currently the bboard 2.1f and likely to stay as that revision, so mark this one done already]
- A unity gain preamplifier (buffer with built in regulator) [a revised version of the old bboard 1.1a boards]
- One or two voltage regulator boards. Probably the basic Z-reg, as a companion to the X-reg board I already have.[these are now done]
- A fully discrete headphone amplifier / preamplifier (with/without voltage regulators built in, we’ll see) [design in progress]
- (A unity gain headphone buffer) [low priority as I don’t see a huge demand for this, most likely offered as a mod to 2.]
- A transistor power amplifier. [unlikely to see more than low level development in 2017, but if 3. is successful I would be looking at scaling it up as a 5-10 W mini amp to drive desktop speakers as the next logical step.]
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