Wouter's page : Audio and stuff

First and foremost, I'm an engineer. I started out building amplifiers and stuff, listening to loud Rock and Heavy Metal, and from there grew into Jazz (not that big a leap, since my father was a great Jazz fan), Classical and Opera. I tend to like the stuff that sound good, with an interesting rhythm. I'm not so much into traditional Jazz or Fusion, but more into Swing and Big Band. I also really don't like dramatic sopranos.

Earworms

• Laibach
• Mafikizolo's Love Potion
• The best brass player in the world
• Duke Ellington's Limbo Jazz

System

Thorens TD-160 turntable, Shure ME75EJ. Cash Converters, late nineties, R35.

Micro Seiki MB14-ST, Glanz MG-110EX. Facebook Marketplace, 2021-02-19, R2700.

Homebrew RIAA pre-amp and rumble filter based on two ESP designs.

Harman / Kardon HD720 CD player.

Re-capping

The seventies and eighties was a bad time for electrolytic capacitors. They get old. Equipment starts acting funny when that happens. Replacing all the capacitors with new (105C) units just makes things better.

• NAD 3150
• NAD 3020A
• AKAI AP-D30

DIY

• W. Marshall Leach, Jr moving coil head amp.
• RJM Audio ECC88 MM phono pre-amp
• TNT FleXy Table
• Cables: Both TNT Audio and Chris VenHaus recommend using CAT5 network cable for making your own cables, so if you want to start with something simple, but labour intensive, check it out.
• Jukka Tolonen built a Peak Level Meter using Indicator Tubes -- I think this will look so cool in a preamplifier. He also built a Tube DAC output stage.
• An outboard DAC can improve on your CD player's built-in DAC in three (main) ways, namely reduced jitter on the digital side, a better filter, and a better analogue output stage. You can read up on this on Norbert Bayer and Marc Heijligers' pages. ESP Project 85 has, in Rod Elliott's words, "quite possibly the simplest possible S/PDIF receiver and DAC you will ever find", using a CS8414 S/PDIF receiver and a CS4334 DAC. The ESP DAC is a good starting point, but it does not address jitter on the input signal at all. The Cirrus (Crystal) CS8420 is a sample rate converter which can be used to completely isolate the DAC clock from the input signal clock and its jitter. Norbert Bayer's DAC4 and DAC5 use the CS8420.
• Tweaking my NAD 3225. Apparently upgrading the 2N3055 output transistors to 2SD733/2SB557 works wonders for the bass. The power supply needs more capacitance as well. I now have two (2001-01-15, correction, three :-) NAD 3225PE's, I'll tweak one and do ABX testing. Also, set the bias correctly.

Notes

• Matching your cartridge and tone arm.

Links

• UHF magazine is on the web, on the ball, and alltogether pretty well jacked up. I sent in my subscription the same day I discovered their web site.
• TNT Audio -- budget tweaks and DIY. Lucio is mad, but he's my kind of mad :-)
• Enjoythemusic has a good collection of tweaks as well.
• Steve Ekblad's Free Audio Software.
• J.C. Morrison's Fi Primer.
• TNT Audio has some great DIY projects.
• ESP Projects Pages -- Very well written DIY articles.
• John Risch's Audio DIY Notes & Tweak Info.
• Marc Heijligers' Audio DAC Page.