Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Gotta get it back up and running...


My entire front end is on the west coast. They are doing well, but I miss 'em. Both phono and line are traveling about. I was ok with this as I needed to work on my whole music server digital rig, BUT.. BUT.. I hit a snag. My ten year old (sweet sounding) dac doesn't like driving the autoformer volume control directly. Its output impedance is way too high. I tried the op amp analog outputs on my Rega Planet that has been my trusty transport - I kinda gagged a little bit - Awful. So I cobbled together something that turned out to be a real beauty.



It is just a line stage. However, it has a very high input impedance and will happily drive the autoformers. The sound is just as I remembered. I love those tennis balls. They have some nice gapped nickel on their plates, of course. Oh, and mercury... Tomorrow I will try it as a strain gauge supply... WE tennis ball strain gauge supply... pure evil... three tubes needle to speakers.. and all directly heated triodes..

4 comments:

  1. God-damned beautiful, even bread-boarded. It's art, what can I say.

    Johnny

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  2. here is a bit I wrote about removing 3 stages of @#$%^& op amps from the rega planet and biassing the dac output in class A:

    http://ultra-fi.blogspot.com/2010/01/modifying-rega-planet.html

    would go nicely with that line stage

    --ps

    ReplyDelete
  3. That is beautiful.

    Wow.

    It is art.

    Wow.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice. What are those, 101Ds? I recognize the united (?) Z-fil 866s. Quite sweet.

    ReplyDelete

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