Electronics

I love my music playback setup that consists of a couple of Squeezebox V3 players in different rooms so I can listen to music in lossless format wherever I am in the apartment. With the iPeng HD app on my iPad, I have a nice interface for controlling the players with album art and other nice features. But the best part is that I can playback high resolution audio directly on my iPad using the Camera Kit USB adapter and an HRT HeadStreamer DAC portable USB headphone amplifier. But I wanted a small, cheap and eco-friendly server for hosting my music files and wondered if I could use the Raspberry Pi. And here’s my findings. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...