A category of articles about doing things yourself or DIY, including making, building, measuring and improving hi-fi gear, records, CDs.
This particular KD-600 came to me very poorly set-up. The deck’s owner received some very bad advice from, of all people, Ortofon! I’m a big fan of Ortofon cartridges, but clearly not everyone there knows what they are talking about.… Read more
Well, I’m happy to say that IKEA comes to the rescue once again, with a great range of storage solutions that suit records perfectly.… Read more
I decided to build a resistance standard, for use with my test and measurement gear and good enough that I could some calibration on test and measurement equipment owned by other people. I wanted to build something that would not be prohibitively expensive and that would allow me to reliably calibrate the resistance ranges of my two Keithley bench multimeters and various Fluke hand-held DMMs to at least 0.01% accuracy.… Read more
I’ve purchased some great new vinyl of late and recently took delivery of some great new polypropylene record sleeves. I get asked lots of questions about how I sleeve and house my records, so I figured I’d write an article about re-sleeving your record collection!
There are two main types of record outer sleeve: polyethylene and polypropylene.… Read more
The LM3886 is one of National Semiconductor’s single-chip monolithic amplifier integrated circuits. It’s almost an entire amplifier-on-a-chip, with only a few extra parts required to build a fully functional, high-performance amplifier.… Read more
The X-CAN V3 uses bipolar output devices, with a tube driver stage. The tube driver stage is a JAN (Joint Army/Navy) 6922 mil-spec dual-triode tube, per channel. These tubes run in class-A and give the voltage gain necessary to drive a pair of BD139/BD140 bipolar transistors.… Read more
I’ve just finished building a Ten-Tec 1253 Regenerative Shortwave Receiver kit and wanted to share some of the build process with you.
The Ten-Tec 1253 is a gorgeous little regenerative shortwave receiver, that is sensitive and fun to build and use. Building the Ten-Tec 1253 was fairly straightforward, there are a couple of little things to watch out for, but it was otherwise a relatively easy build for an experienced constructor.… Read more
I recently designed and build a set of speaker stands, for my own pair of Yamaha NS-1000M studio monitors. I recommend this project to anyone looking to put their own Yamaha NS-1000M speakers on stands and will describe the basic construction here.
First, get the wood. I used square-section pine for the legs and had 8 x 300mm lengths cut at my local hardware store.… Read more
