Look at tubes4audio.com or diytubes.com Both have kits and are a good starting place. I love my st-50 and st-80, which are quite musical and competitive with the big name amps I've had. Roy at tubes4audio can have a very nice top plate fabricated. It actually looks better than the photos on the website. A poplar or walnut box from welbornelabs.com makes for a professional, nice looking tube amp. Bottlehead.com for intro to preamps and single-ended amp. Good luck.
Want to build my own equipment.
Good Afternoon,
I have been crazy like most of you about music for a long time, love all aspects of it! Love audio equipment, and I like to build and engineer things as well. I want to get into building an amp or amps and a pre-amp that will out play my classe ca 101's running in a mono format and my 47.5 pre-amplifier. I would like to get better immaging a larger soundstage, and rediculous power. How does one do this? Does any one have any experienc in building these components, where should I start, how expensive is this to do? And am I crazy for even attempting such an ordeal. Any advice is greatly appreciated!!!!
I have been crazy like most of you about music for a long time, love all aspects of it! Love audio equipment, and I like to build and engineer things as well. I want to get into building an amp or amps and a pre-amp that will out play my classe ca 101's running in a mono format and my 47.5 pre-amplifier. I would like to get better immaging a larger soundstage, and rediculous power. How does one do this? Does any one have any experienc in building these components, where should I start, how expensive is this to do? And am I crazy for even attempting such an ordeal. Any advice is greatly appreciated!!!!
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- 12 posts total
Sounds like you have the talent, skill and inspiration. Can't tell if you have the technical background / education. If you have that, then all you need is time, money and test equipment. Quality reference units would be a help too. If you have never actually built a piece of equipment before, I highly recommend you start with kits, as others have said. You may even find that they give you all the satisfaction you are looking for. Here's another source : Bottlehead |
You might have a look here http://www.passdiy.com/ and the pass labs forum here http://www.diyaudio.com/ to get some good ideas. |
I dont know why you want to do that. If you enjoy building things, that is fine. But it is very difficult to build something that can better the high-end commercial products. I was a DYIer in the 70s and 80s and I used to own an Audio Research SP6A preamp. In the good old days, the user manual of the preamp came with complete schematic and part list. So I built a few clones for my friends, each one was a little different and included what I considered improvements. But no matter what I did, none of the clones sounded as good as the original. The reason was two words: measuring equipment. I had a cheap scope, a DIY signal generator, and a multi-meter. But in order to fine tune the amp, you need precision measuring equipment, which costs about the same as a complete high-end audio system. |
- 12 posts total