Category Archives: DIY

A category of articles about doing things yourself or DIY, including making, building, measuring and improving hi-fi gear, records, CDs.

DIY, Service, Turntables & Vinyl, Videos

Kenwood KD-600 Turntable Service & Setup

Video 3 Comments

In this video, I explain some considerations when correctly setting up a turntable like the legendary Kenwood KD-600.

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

DIY, Service, Turntables & Vinyl

Kenwood KD-500 / KD-550 Turntable Motor Service

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I’m sure every regular visitor to my site knows just how much I love the old Kenwood KD synthetic composite turntables, especially the KD-600/650 series. But the classic Kenwood KD-500/550 is far more common and so I’ve written an article about servicing their direct-drive motors, for anyone who can’t get their deck into me for service, or who just wants to do it themselves.
… Read more
DIY, Turntables & Vinyl

Record Storage – IKEA Kallax Makes Storing Vinyl a Breeze!

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Organising vinyl can be challenging at the best of times. If you’ve ever watched High Fidelity, and you should have, you’ll know that you can spend ages just working out how to categorise and sort your records. Before we get to that though, there is the age-old issue of how to store them…

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

DIY

Building a Resistance Calibration Standard

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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

DIY, Turntables & Vinyl

Re-Sleeve your Record Collection!

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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

Amplifiers, DIY

LM3886 Chip-Amp / Gainclone Amplifier Project Build

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I recently built a dual-mono LM3886 chip-amp / gainclone amplifier from a kit sold by the now-defunct chipamp.com. In this article, I discuss the history of the gainclone and how I built my chip-amp.

The LM3886 is one of Texas Instrument’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

Amplifiers, DIY, Upgrades

Musical Fidelity X-Can V3 Headphone Amplifier Modifications

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I recently modified a Musical Fidelity X-CAN V3 headphone amplifier. My goal was to see what sort of improvements I could make without spending too much cash.

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.… Read more