DIY

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

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Kenwood KD-600 Turntable Service & Setup

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 […]

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Kenwood KD-500 / KD-550 Turntable Motor Service

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

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IKEA

Record Storage – IKEA Kallax Makes Storing Vinyl a Breeze!

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

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Building a Resistance Calibration Standard

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

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Re-Sleeving your Record Collection!

I’ve purchased some great new vinyl of late and recently took delivery of some 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 sleeves: polyethylene and

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Gainclone

LM3886 Gainclone Chip-Amp Project Build

In this article, I discuss the history of the LM3886/chip-amp/gaincard and run through building my own dual-mono LM3886 gainclone amplifier. 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. The LM3886 features low

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Musical Fidelity X-Can V3 Headphone Amplifier Modifications

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 Musical Fidelity 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

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Ten-Tec 1253 Regenerative Shortwave Receiver Build

I’ve just finished building a Ten-Tec 1253 Regenerative Shortwave Receiver kit and wanted to share some of the build process. The Ten-Tec 1253 is a gorgeous little regenerative shortwave receiver, that is sensitive and fun to build and use. These radio kits were available here in Australia for $135, though as of 2018, they are

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DIY Yamaha NS-1000M Speaker Stands

I recently created a set of DIY NS-1000M speaker stands for my Yamaha NS-1000M studio monitors. DIY Yamaha NS-1000M speaker stands might seem like a strange thing to talk about until you try to find a suitable pair of stands for your own NS-1000s. One thing you will absolutely need to get the most out

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