It didn't explode....... YET (aka niges amp)

[Sligolad]

I am more than ready to grab a case at this point and start building Fran, will be good to get everyone to have a case now and get some skin in the game by starting to build their own amps.
We can get together more often then to share different stages of build and help one another out as we progress to the finished articles.

[nige2000]

think we would be best organise another group day possibly with homework , probably do it here.
i may not be available next sat but after that should be ok

[tony]

Have some better photos but need to save them at a lower resolution to upload. ......

Pixresizer is your friend.... http://bluefive.pairsite.com/pixresizer.htm

Thanks Ivor only seeing this now. You did advise me of that before! I forgot!

[randytsuch]

How's the progress?

I've been reading this thread the past few days, great project.

Inspired me to look for my old gainclone, found it in the garage last night.
Now just need to feed it lifepo4 power lol. I used to run it with sla batteries. That was many years ago, before I found lifepo4's.

Randy

[Fran]

I picked up the remainder of the copper links for the battery packs tonight - many thanks to naasbiker for sourcing a pretty difficult to find item!


Fran

[nige2000]

How's the progress?

I've been reading this thread the past few days, great project.

Inspired me to look for my old gainclone, found it in the garage last night.
Now just need to feed it lifepo4 power lol. I used to run it with sla batteries. That was many years ago, before I found lifepo4's.

Randy

were waiting on getting some aluminium stuff cnc machined

i would imagine sla batteries would sound a bit flat and polite in this application

i have spare charging and amp/buffer pcbs here if your so inclined

[nige2000]

I picked up the remainder of the copper links for the battery packs tonight - many thanks to naasbiker for sourcing a pretty difficult to find item!


Fran

great stuff they make it so much easier

[randytsuch]

were waiting on getting some aluminium stuff cnc machined

i would imagine sla batteries would sound a bit flat and polite in this application

i have spare charging and amp/buffer pcbs here if your so inclined

CNC machined? Between that and the 3d printing and the nice PCBs, very professional looking project.
Your fellow audio nuts are lucky to have you over there leading this project.

Mine will be very garage shop in comparison. I'm thinking I'll use 7 batteries a rail, around 24VDC. And a lot of small transformers, versus a couple large custom ones. I thought about charging with just one positive and one negative rail, but decided to follow your lead and make individual chargers per battery. This will still be a decidedly much lower budget version of this amp, hoping it will sound decent.

At the time, I thought my chip amp sounded pretty good, but I'm sure lifepo4's will sound much better. BTW, it got pushed into a corner so I could play with tubes lol.

I'll send a PM about the pcb's

thanks
Randy

[nige2000]

were waiting on getting some aluminium stuff cnc machined

i would imagine sla batteries would sound a bit flat and polite in this application

i have spare charging and amp/buffer pcbs here if your so inclined

CNC machined? Between that and the 3d printing and the nice PCBs, very professional looking project.
Your fellow audio nuts are lucky to have you over there leading this project.

Mine will be very garage shop in comparison. I'm thinking I'll use 7 batteries a rail, around 24VDC. And a lot of small transformers, versus a couple large custom ones. I thought about charging with just one positive and one negative rail, but decided to follow your lead and make individual chargers per battery. This will still be a decidedly much lower budget version of this amp, hoping it will sound decent.

At the time, I thought my chip amp sounded pretty good, but I'm sure lifepo4's will sound much better. BTW, it got pushed into a corner so I could play with tubes lol.

I'll send a PM about the pcb's

thanks
Randy

its very much a collaboration here everyone's been very helpful so far
doing the casework well is probably the most painful process but well get there in the end

in theory you could use only use 10 cells total +/- 16.5v/18v and be totally usable (think the min is +/-12v )
i prefered the sound of the higher voltages maybe more lively/powerful and more resolution

[randytsuch]

Min is 20V per the datasheet. I thought that was per rail, but now realize that is total swing.

Back in the day, I remember talk that they sounded better with lower voltages, not down at 20V, maybe in the high 30's or low 40's. But that was with unregulated supplies, very basic, so what you're doing is completely different. What's a couple more batteries at this point lol.

Casework is always the biggest pain/most time consuming aspect, at least that's been my experience. I have a couple old cases, I plan to figure out which one will work best and recycle it. One way to save costs. I will have significantly less heatsinking, but I can't imagine that will be a problem.

Biggest hurdle I see at this point is figuring out where to source the transformer from. But there are lots of options, so will figure that out.

Randy