My twelve year old son want’s to learn how to program. My first idea was to teach him Ruby or Python, but I decided to go with Arduino. It’s C-based so that’s a good start I think. Were currently planning a couple of projects but so far he’s managed to get some LED’s blinking. A good start.
Adding a Kingwa clock to a Pioneer PD S-505
Here is the second part of how to improve the quality of an old CD player, the Pioneer PD S-505. You can find the first part here. In this section, I’m going to show you how to install a better, more stable clock circuit into your 505 to lower the jitter. This particular clock comes from Kingwa, that has a series of crystal oscillators for improving DVD players, CD players, and DACs. The price is reasonable. I’ve installed them in three different units and had zero problems, so the quality seems reasonable.
Ok, so why install a new clock? Isn’t there one in there already? Yes, your right. But by using better parts like crystals with lower ppm and also design a very clean power supply to feed the clock, you can make your CD-player sound much better. And the reason is lower jitter.
But what is jitter? There is plenty of excellent places to go read up on it. Here’s some. [Read more…]
ProAc Response 2.5 clones plays real music
So finally my new ProAc Response 2.5 clone playing music. And how they play! I got myself a new Class-A amplifier to have something nice to drive them with. At first they sounded a bit short on the bass side, but now after about 20 hours of listening, the bass starts to improve. I’ve never believed in the “burn-in” of speakers, but I have to say I’ve been mistaken.
I invited some friends over for a music listening party. A lot of records and an even larger amount of beer made for a beautiful evening.
At the same time I ordered my new amplifier, I also ordered a new DVD player with DVD-Audio and SACD playing capability. So I rush out to get my hands on a SACD record, but the only one I could find was the slightly overplayed Dark side of the moon by Pink Floyd. But it was a good test record because I have two different mastering versions on cd, so comparing was easy. And to my surprise the CD (actually Flac played through my Squeezebox) sounded better than the SACD one! So I had to check that the player didn’t play the normal cd layer, but no, it played the SACD layer. The singing voices on the SACD sounded muffled compared to the Japanese pressing of the CD. Also the pinpointing of instrument placements in the stereo image was not as good an coherent from the SACD. The player a Pioneer 696 is a low budget player so it could be it. But I’ll crank up the manual and check so I haven’t done something stupid with the settings.
More testing tomorrow…
CMoy DIY Headphone Amplifier
Building the venerable CMoy DIY Headphone Amplifier
The last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking of building a small headphone amplifier. I want to tap into the line-out of my iPod to get better sound. I also have a problem with my headphone jack on my pod. After fighting with my friend Hermans dog, he managed to get his paw entangled in my headphone cables and destroyed the cable jack. So I have searched the net to try to find a good amplifier to build (I don’t have the money to buy one right now), and I found the Cmoy headphone amplifier. But I used another build page that has some upgrades to it. Unfortunately I could not find the bread board they used, so I had to make my own design. So after a couple of hours of soldering and using a drill it was time to try it out. And it worked! No debugging or anything. This must be a first.
Learning electronics
This is a great way of learning electronics. Just read the articles at TangentSoft about audio amplifiers and you will learn a lot on how audio and amplifiers work. And you’ll find ways of improving or even building better headphone amplifiers as well. You’ll even learn how to improve manufactured headphone amplifiers by modding them.
So how does the CMoy amplifier sound? Loud! And I think the quality is very good. I have tested them on my Shure e2c, Koss MX100 and my Sennheiser 600. I didn’t do a lot of listening with the 600, but the Koss MX 100 get a big quality improvement. Will continue to test it out tomorrow.
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