GainPre?

Listening to the phonoclone

Last modified: 01-Jul-2003

Chips'n'Tubes

The amp is still breaking in, so please be patient. I guess that there will be several mods made to the phonoclone before it's time to start a review.

I plan to write-up some sort of review later when I have the time not only to listen to this amp but also compare it to the tube amplifiers Tweety and Loekie.

Not that I plan to start a war between tube and solid state addicts, but I happen to have several tube amps to compare it with.

Preliminary Conclusion

After listening to the GainPre more than a week I thought it was time to do a write-up of my findings. First of all: The noise level of the GainPre is higher than that of my tube amps (and also higher than the phono equaliser of the Marantz PM-14 amplifier). And apart from it's sound qualities, in the current design of the GainPre the noise is just too high for High-End purposes.

However, I do like the sound of OpAmps. They're fast and very good for Pop music. Therefore I had two alternatives left over:

Rework the GainPre from top to bottom and change all the resistors to lower values and change the capacitors with better ones (I might do this anyway and publish a better schematic on page 1 and 2)
Integrate all this wishdom in the follow-on project PhonoClone.

I opted for the second option as the PhonoClone was already nearly completed when I wrote this text, and the setup of the PhonoClone leaves much more room for prototyping (chip sockets, more spacious design etc.) and therefore I will incorporate my experience in the PhonoClone.

At a later stage, it is easy to upgrade the GainPre since the basic design is exactly the same as the PhonoClone.

Recommendations

Therefore, should you want to experiment with low-cost (well ...) OpAmp designs, my advise is to use the PhonoClone schematic and leave out all the optional settings and components and you'll build your GainPre with lower noise...

If you are looking for a low-priced phono equaliser to listen to your favourite records every now and then, the GainPre is worth listening too.

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