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Dear DIYers, dear Pass Labs crew,
after building some of the Pass' (or Pass-style) projects, among these
an heavy-biased pair of Aleph 5 mono amplifier, a couple of
preamplifiers, and a Zen-inspired headphone amplifier, I found this kind
of sound close to my tastes, in other words almost all the features I
was looking for from a playback system could be find with this
approach.
So when the RIAA moment has come,
we (me and Gary, a friend of mine, he is Italian but quite... British
Inside ® ;-) ) decided to build an Aleph Ono clone. On the contrary
from the previous projects, the Ono construction has been very close to
the original one, with no substantial modification. The preamp and the
power supply boards have been designed separately, to simplify the
design and to have good chance against noise, even if short (silvered-OFC
PTFE insulated) wiring had to be used. The boards design was made very
carefully, low level signals, high gain and feedback loops have they
needs.
Everything in this preamplifier
has been homemade, PCB have been etched with ultra-violet transfer
method. The audio circuit ones are double-sided indeed. As a rule, top
layer was assigned to power lines, the bottom layer to signal
connections. Components quality is very good, without audiophile
aberrations. The RIAA network components have been hand-selected with a
precision HP bridge, since I could not find 1% (or better) stuff for all
the values. Only polypropilene/polistyrene caps here.
The sonic result is really
astonishing, after a couple months burning-in: with a Benz MC cartridge
(and no need to further load the cartridge with a proper dip-switch
selection) the listening pleasure is far better from what a Linn Karik
can give, at least according to my taste.
We would like to thank heartily
Nelson Pass, Wayne Colburn and all the guys there in Forest Hill, your
unselfish open-minded support to DIYers is not so common, and we all do
appreciate it a lot.
Marcello
Pellerano |
