Passinwind

It's been quite a change of pace from all the battery powered circuits I've been doing for the last few years, 500VDC is no joke when it wants to bite you. Haven't decided whether to do a B channel and use a set of the PW7 boards, but there's already a nice +/- 15V supply on the power amp board, and plenty of spare current capacity. The A channel will be mostly tube based in any case.

No different than the 40+ years of gigs, my man.

Yep, I retired from gigging a few years ago and am in the process of building a much nicer and/or bigger rig than I ever gigged with...go figure.

Hi John, I've finally had occasion to break out one of the older revisions of the preamp in question, in the blue box to the right: The power amp module is strangely big and heavy, and not particularly efficient...😎

67 years old here. "Old" and "new" are always a moving playing field as far as my perception. The last thing I heard that seemed genuinely new was Esperanza Spalding's Exposure stream a few years ago. Missed a couple of night's sleep for that as it went dfown, which I think must be a geezer's highest compliment.

Please tell her that we’re looking forward to her superior dead baby song.😎

Nope. And no prospects any time soon, as things are going in the wrong direction here at the moment. Looks like I will get to do another small outdoor private jam tomorrow with my regular Friday night crew though, at least.

Many vendors sell tubular brass shims to alleviate that very problem. It's not too hard to improvise a DIY solution either, a cut up soda or beer can works OK for instance. For those of us in or near the US, these guys have a few different Kilo knobs at really good prices: https://lovemyswitches.com/knobs/ Interesting on Digikey, in the past I've been told that Mouser (the other main player here) shipped parts from the US by default.

In the context of jazz with acoustic piano you are generally expected to tune to the piano by ear. I made this faux pas myself as a rookie in a big band, but most of time the keyboard player brought an electric one and it didn't matter, and sometimes the acoustic ones have been so out of tune that it also didn't matter. The real fun started when there was no keyboard player and the whole band tuned to my fretless bass, and not to a pitch with a marker either. 😉

There's always that one more thing, isn't there? 😎

What specs do you need for the regulator John? And BTW, I share your pain when it comes to metalwork. Literally, my fingers are a mess right now from hand filling a power switch opening in 1/8" aluminium two days ago

I see the separate supplies as potentially a big plus actually. Not easier to deal with though, of course. My cost would be substantially higher though, and I already have too many amps!

Needs more cowbell.

I believe the NC500MP OEM is the one my friend Jule Potter is using in his new "pedalboard" power amp. I'm in no hurry to do any more Class D builds but it could be fun to give a different brand a try eventually. That said, both the Icepower 500ASP and 700ASC modules were pretty easy to work with beyond the cable fabrication end, but even that just takes a few Web clicks and a few weeks waiting time under normal circumstances. I just got in an order for something else from that vendor in the ROC, it took about 5-6 weeks this time around.

I wasn't calling you out in any way John, I think you're doing it just right. Rod is in a position of extreme responsibilty and potential liability, and he did offer a Class D module as part of one or more projects a few years ago, but apparently doesn't anymore. I've purposely kept a lot of details of my DIY builds a bit vague in forum posts, but as always I'm happy to share more in PMs. I'm always surprised not to see more mention of Hypex. They make great sounding stuff and are happy to support DIY'ers fully. In the US the ICEpower rep is a great guy and has helped me a lot, but tech support comes from Denmark and IME those guys are pretty much all business. They changed their presence at NAMM from a public booth to appointment-only in a private office this year and I can't say I blame them. My first module came from a gray market source (lightly used evaluation kit) and was pretty expensive, but the guy was very helpful and made me a nice cable set on his nickel. For the last three I called in favors, schmoozed the right people, and so on, and the price for 700ASCs was very reasonable.

Agreed, but in many parts of the world including the US it would be sketchy to even publish anything with the usual SMPS supply format that so many Class D amps use. DIYaudio used to explicitly forbid it, not sure if they're still held to that or not though. For my part, I'm deep into a tube bass amp build at the moment. Just about everything about it is a real shock after all the battery powered stuff I've been doing for the last few years, hopefully not literally though!

Project 27 works really well for a bass preamp IME. I gigged with a DIY rack preamp using his V1 board for quite a few years and that build ended up in a NAMM booth earlier this year actually. Hopefully Rod will do boards for at least some parts of his new bass preamp project as well.

As a long term straight ahead jazz performer and a general weirdo, no problem there at all. And I like it that way!

Marco Bass Guitars MV4:

Sure, nearly any new Alembic for starters. And then of course a nice upright can easily cost double or triple that figure.

I'll be interested to see how that bright switch works out; I've used it in the Rod Elliot preamp design I lifted it from but not in the board you have. Nice to hear that you're making noise now!

It a really simple build, and fDeck has published the schematic for his v3 now. I could knock off a board layout very quickly, but he's a friend and even though he's said he'd be OK with that I'd rather not. I've done a design during lockdown for a 12dB/oct one with a resonance control that will be open source and intended for DIY builders, just have to build one myself and make sure it performs as expected.

Yep, it's not even the same ballpark at all.

I had already been semi-retired from gigging for a couple of years before this mess started. I have a pretty strong inclination to just make it permanent and move on to other things. It'd take more than low rent bar gigs to entice me at this point in any case.

I just ordered a few sets of I/O cables from Ghent the other day, not for the first time. IME the key to good consistent crimps is to use a real crimping tool, i.e. not just a generic hand one meant for occasional prototyping . Real JST hand crimpers are already about $400 new over here and you need two different models to do the ICE modules I've worked with. If you go for powered ones with thermal stripping you're looking at a few $K each. And at least that's one of my older board layouts, which are often much easier to do mods on. The SMT onboard preamps I'm doing these days are really not all that much fun to work on.