DIY doesn't save you money

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karatestu
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DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by karatestu »

When I started diy audio in 2006 it was for a mixture of saving money, being able to build and modify stuff and I got addicted to the improvements (imo) that I heard and the enhanced enjoyment I got from the music.

Well, it didn't take long to realise that I wasn't saving money. But I have ahoard of tools and parts that you wouldn't believe. It has been an enjoyable hobby and hobbies cost money. What I have been able to do is build things EXACTLY how I want them which can NEVER BE attained from buying off the shelf products. Different parts of the system can be tailored to suit the other parts of the system. Throw in some over engineering and you have something that will last rather than buy some throw away kit that can't be repaired.
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by SteveTheShadow »

The money I’ve spent on DIY audio doesn’t bear thinking about. :lol:
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karatestu (Fri Dec 04, 2020 7:34 am)
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by karatestu »

Yeah, probably best not to think about it. I do wonder sometimes what level of kit I could have bought with all that money. Wouldn't be the same though.
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by NSNO2021 »

And even as a mere DIY novice I can whole heartedly agree, my ongoing Cubix refurbishment will have cost circa £900 in parts & materials by the time its finished and believe me when I say it could easily have been twice that if I hadn't had some good advice.
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by SteveTheShadow »

karatestu wrote: Fri Dec 04, 2020 7:37 am Yeah, probably best not to think about it. I do wonder sometimes what level of kit I could have bought with all that money...
Me too, and it gets very depressing, very quickly if one dwells on it too long.

I’ve been at it for longer than I can remember and have come to the unfortunate conclusion that except for speakers (and you have to be damned lucky in that respect to be honest) the average bodger as RD called us, doesn’t have a hope in hell of making anything as good as a commercial piece of hi-end amplification.

In the case of valve amplification, I’ve been hung up for far too long on single ended triodes. To get a SET amp to sound as it should, you need to spend thousands and thousands of pounds on high quality PSU chokes, even higher quality output transformers, very high spec (read very expensive) power supply and coupling caps, because they are directly in the signal path. The output valves ideally need to be NOS 845, 833A, 211 at four-figure voltages, in order to get decent power levels, and if you go the low power high efficiency speaker route, you are looking at expensive 300Bs or even more expensive PX4 or PX25 British triodes.

I’ve been banging my head on a brick wall, trying for 15 years to do single ended triodes or ultralinear with cheap iron and it simply doesn’t work. It cannot work period. Now you might well ask, how do I know this? Simple. Don’t get me wrong, my latest amp sounds great, with it’s twin power supplies, British small signal valves on the inputs and modern production pentodes in ultralinear configuration as outputs. But here’s the thing. It weighs a ton, pulls 150W out of the wall, for 10WPC and the mains transformers and chokes are mechanically noisy in operation and are irritatingly audible in quiet passages.

My NVA, A20 on the other hand is basically a class B (horrors!) transistor amplifier. It pulls 10W out of the wall when idling, makes 25WPC. AND (now I’ve sorted the dry joints on the LS5 speaker cables) when it is fed from a BTE passive pre with high quality stepped attenuator, it sounds just as good in the mids and treble as the single ended, valve setup, images just as well, and frankly pisses all over it in the bass dept. And all this lovely music for £300. It cost me more than that for my noisy bastard mains transformers.

The major take away from all this, is that for you to be a successful DIY’er in the valve amplification department, and to be able to play with the big boys....wait for it.....excuse the caps - YOU NEED A GREAT DEAL OF MONEY. You can design as much technically superb gear as you want, of that there is no doubt, and you can learn a lot on the way and have a lot of fun. However the inescapable fact remains, that if you don’t have the cash required to pay for the iron, don’t try to kid yourself that you will EVER make anything other than a good amplifier. The chance of making a GREAT one is completely non-existent - not with single-ended amplification at any rate.

The irony in all this, is that the best sounding valve amps I have made, have been the three push-pull setups, using first, EL84s, then EL34s, then KT66s, with a phase splitting input transformer, followed by differential pre and driver stages. The input transformers cost me £70 the pair from Sowter, and the output transformers sounded better than any cheap-ass single ended OPT I’ve ever heard. And yet I abandoned push-pull. Go figure.

Anyway despite all this. DIY audio is a good hobby, but I think one does have to keep one’s feet on the ground and accept, that people like Richard, Lurcher, Tim De Paravicini, and Colin W to name a few, know exactly what they’re doing, can blow you away any day of the week and you can’t compete with them. DIY does not save you money. :lol:
Last edited by SteveTheShadow on Fri Dec 04, 2020 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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karatestu (Fri Dec 04, 2020 11:28 am) • NSNO2021 (Sat Dec 05, 2020 12:11 am)
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by Vinyl-ant »

Yes to all above.
After I got the f5, i used it for a couple of weeks, then put the el34 amp back in that id been working on for a few years. Then binned it.
But its fun.
I dont do amps any more, i piss about with turntables, i can do them, i understand them, nick, colin w, et al have forgotten more than i know about amps.
Give me some machine tools and a hammer and ill build something mechanical, ask me to design an amp, and it will work, but dont expect anything remotely stellar.
Incedentally, i built 3 push pull amps, a 45, a 2a3 and a 6c4c, and they were really nice but all the se amps i did were abit crap. Especially when using some relatively cheap tomiko toroidal optx...

Edit: i did build a really nice phono stage too using nuvistors, that was designed in a collaboration with nick, andrew and mike h (i.e they designed it, i just asked stupid questions....) on audio talk. I never got it quiet enough but it did sound great. So sometimes you can strike gold......
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by karatestu »

:crying-yellow: :crying-yellow: :crying-yellow: Why do we bother :sad-roulette: :obscene-tolietclaw: :obscene-hanged:

Well I am glad I haven't attempted to make any valve amps Steve. They scare the crap out of me with those insane voltages. Are your NVA amps back in the system for good then ?

I have never tried to design anything much apart from my speakers but they are borrowing ideas from all over (mostly RD). It makes it so much easier having others work to use with your own twist. The doping of the cones makes it much easier as I don't have to design a crossover other than the natural roll off of the woofer and the single cap on the tweeters.

I have built all sorts of things from scratch like regulators, gyrators, mosfet gyrators, power supplies, cdp clocks but that has all been using tried and tested designs done by people much cleverer than me.

The amplifiers using NVA boards are particularly interesting with trying out all sorts of psu configurations and layouts. To front end regulate or not - I still can't decide which is best.

A lot of my work concerns how to layout all this stuff in a way that ALL transformers are well away from the sensitive circuitry they power, minimal cabling and sockets whilst having sort distances between stages (TT or CDP - phono amp - source selector - volume control - power amp boards - speakers)

I particularly enjoy simplifying things, removing parts not needed and getting back to the music. If think the big win for me is the bespoke nature of the end result - you won't be able to buy it anywhere.
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by SteveTheShadow »

Well, the NVA amp is staying in the system until I design something better. So it’ll probably be a very long time. :lol:
Interesting you talking about layout etc, with the NVA boards. I tried the twin psu, NVA clone in the system and although it was more detailed, it was also harder sounding than the real NVA amp.
I suspect the steel case. I know that Richard certainly hated what steel cases did to the sound of his designs. He said aluminium was better, but that acrylic was even better.
What I’ll probably do in the new year, is rebuild the clone into a veneered wooden casing, glued together, with no screws and see what happens.
As for the valve amp it’s going to be push-pull, real world stuff from now on. SE can go feck itself. I’ve had enough of it TBH.
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by Daniel Quinn »

I got the acrylic for my mono amps for £40.

Thats 300mm x210mm.
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Re: DIY doesn't save you money

Unread post by SteveTheShadow »

Cheers DQ. That’s not a bad price.
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