New decade, end of the CD?

It lacks lettering because I haven't decided how to do that yet - the traditional home-constructor method is to use Letraset and I hate that, so I'm looking into other methods such as silk-screen and laser-cut lettering. I have put a pair of speaker terminals on the back because I can, but realistically it can only drive hi-Z speakers because of the limited space available for heat-sinking within the box. Because it is a Class-A design it will generate a lot of heat and while the transistors are on heat-sinks that are thermally connected to the aluminium case I'm not going to run it at theoretical full power (around 10W per channel). However it drives my Mid-Z headphones wonderfully with barely any background noise and thankfully hardly any mains buzz (I used a screen military grade toroidal transformer, plenty of decoupling/filtering and paid special attention to ac wiring in the confinds of the case). In retrospect I should have either used a bigger case or put the PSU in a seperate box to ensure zero coupling between the AC and the audio signal just to make my life a little easier, but as it is it is no worse than anyother AC-powered HP amp I've heard. All-in-all I'm rather proud of it. (I haven't added up how much it cost me to build, but I guess it was around £70... which isn't too scary compared to a ready built one off-the-shelf).

 

 

 

I have also purchaed the FiFo E11 portable HP amp I mentioned before - it cost me £44.42 from Amazon at the time (the price has since gone up) and it is a little gem. I love it because it can drive my Howland West waferlite headphones, something that none of my mp3 players or the little E5 can do, (it has a 3-position gain switch for low, medium and high impedance headphones). I used it extensively while on holiday in France and never needed to recharge the battery (my Archos-5 media player on the otherhand needed recharging everyother night).