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Recently, after a period of more than a year I picked up reading the diyaudio forum. I more or less expected that not much would have changed. There are Solid State fans building big PASS-like amps, Tube addicts and Gainclone fanatics. But I was wrong, again a new concept was added: Class D. And if not added since I left, at least it got much much more attention.
I noticed that the attention for GainClone machines has shifted towards a new technology: Class D amplifiers. Hifi fanatics, and especially those that build their own gear are always looking for the next best thing that delivers massive power, no distortion, sounds wonderful and transparent at almost no cost. I sometimes think a lot of people on these HiFi and DIY forums are more listening to their soldering iron than to their music, and with the risk that everything we built and spent money on must sound right or else there is nothing to talk about.
Maybe it is therefore that you'll see the same names coming to the "hot" forums everytime. After building there best-sounding-ever-Gainclone they starting building the -improved-best-sounding-ever-Class-D amp. And since it is difficult to prove such claims, but also in a generic sense to say they're incorrect (some might be actually very good) we're all hopping from one technology to the other.
Class-T is the unofficial name for Class-D amplifiers that use the Tripath chip for amplification. The AMP-5 uses the Tripath 2022 chip. The Tripath company was very succesful with their chips, but due to financial reasons they went out of business somewhere in 2006 leaving the market with loads of stock of the Tripath chip, while their IP was bought by other companies.
So far, as far as I know there have not been new chips manufactured based on the exact Tripath/Class-T designs, but fortunately there is enough stock left for us DIY people to continue building for some time. And also there are still quite a few smaller Chinese manufacturers offering cheaps amps based on the Tripath TA2024, TA202 etc. and at the same time Hypex is offering UCD based modules for hight-performance units (both to industry and to DIY community).
I bought my kit from Jan @ 41hz.com, called AMP5. The kit contains all components
necessary to populate the PCB, so the only items one has to buy are transformer,
enclosure and a couple of connectors.
On the left you see the empty board for the AMP5 the components are all trough-hole and not SMD. Still you would not believe how small some components are and believe that you have to solder these on the board. I took the AMP5 over the AMP1 because of the hole mounting as I expected the SMD boards to be even more difficult to solder. Maybe next time I'm going to reconsider that decision and look at a SMD board :-) .
Some spec for AMP5:
That said, building the kit is not that easy at all. The manual written by Jan is good, but really this amp with all the SMD-size components will be difficult to build for beginners.
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