ZA Furries

I have decided to come up with my own brand of audio gear.
There is one product in development, if you have perused my YouTube channel you would have seen the HDM01 which is a high-end audiophile grade headphone amplifier.

This is the no-expense-spared type of gear, so it is insanely expensive. I am already over R1.5k in, and around R30k in development cost.

But the more important question is, how does it sound? Well, let's put it this way, with Sennheiser cans, and a copy of KRAFTWERK - TOUR DE FRANCE I picked up yesterday, it is the first time I have heard anything with deep bass that doesn't distort, its clean like a clean room, surgically so.

The bass on that recording is very deep, and it shakes my head, the headphones vibrate like a subwoofer does, but with no distortion!!!! It has taken me years, almost my entire lifetime to achieve this. The amplifier stage was tested by some leading audiophiles in SA to rave reviews, so after all this time it freaking works... Farking hell...


I am going to finish this up and bring it to the market so the next product can be developed.

Each unit will be hand-made, 6 week delivery lead-time. Because it is hand-made and the components have to be matched up by hand.
SSRP: R5995.00

That is quite the achievement, congratulations! I hope it works out on the market.

That's a ton of money. And I'd like to know how it compares to my R1000 Schiit Magni.

I have Xonar DX, HD650, Schiit Magni.

Forgive me if I am skeptical, but I am very skeptical when it comes to audio.

It is a ton of money indeed. And for a good reason.
It costs money to match the components, and no expense was spared. And when I say it is good, I mean it. Anything hand-made costs money and lots of it.
I am not interested in mass-produced crap. Oh no, this is for the discerning listener, who is willing to pay for it and wait for it to be fabricated.

There is that other Sennheiser set, that costs R600k. That is far more extreme than this.

When it comes to this I am also skeptical, but I believe I have something special here.

Like I said, I am skeptical no matter how you dress it with words. The Schiit Magni/Modi and O2 DAC/Amp are amazing price:performance units under $200 (~$100 per DAC/Amp) that have been raved on for years and years. The O2 unit has open source designs and is very well documented to it's pros and cons. The same person also goes through many audiophile myths and resolves them: http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/

The reason for my skepticism is kinda obvious, the audiophile world is full of snake-oil and placebo effects. Just because someone is able to distort the sound with changing op-amps in their DAC - doesn't mean that they've improved it. But because they have boosted mid-bass they feel like they have...

Accuracy-focused products is something lacking from most audiophile-orientated products these days, which is almost hilariously ironic. This is why I would only look at studio-grade products these days, or similar. Anything geared towards the audiophile (audiofool?) market tends to follow the same path as computer hardware geared towards 'gamers'.

I agree with what you are saying.

First of all, we know what snake-oil is. I don't have an audiophile background, rather I come from the industrial side of things, where precision is important.

Doesn't mean I can't make money out of the audiofools now can I?

This is also an open-source design... Make it yourself, or pay me buckletloads of cash for my time and effort.

I'm just saying until I have heard and/or compared it myself as well as seen what has gone into it - I wouldn't actually want to buy it. Especially considering it's 'just' an amp. Now if it was a DAC with hardware EQ.... that'd be another story.

But that's just me.

Sonic2k wrote:This is also an open-source design... Make it yourself, or pay me buckletloads of cash for my time and effort.

Fluke wrote:I'm just saying until I have heard and/or compared it myself as well as seen what has gone into it - I wouldn't actually want to buy it. Especially considering it's 'just' an amp. Now if it was a DAC with hardware EQ.... that'd be another story.

But that's just me.

It has a DAC, multiple inputs, an e-volume block, a menu driven display so you can control the EQ, etc..

I think I should rather stick to being a furry, it seems that is the only way to be somewhat happy in this life.

I'm not going to spend R6000 on a product because I pity the seller or because someone told me it's good. R6000 is not a small amount of money to potentially throw-away. Sorry, that's just a fact of how business works. If you don't feel like you're cut out for selling these as a hobby / past-time - then make that decision by yourself. But guessing on your amount spent on it - there must be a reason for that.

I basically want you to sell this to me, NwAvGuy does a great job of that for the O2. But that's very technical. Schiit mix technicalities and general market-talk, as well as having reviews of them before.

Things like; maximum power rating at what resistance, THD, SNR, Gain options, freq response, is it a solid-state based amp or tube? As well as specifics such as pictures and whatnot would be a great starting point.

I have finished this project eventually.

I spent the last month or so eliminating all sources of distortion. This means the amplifier has no capacitors in the signal path, aside from ones at the input, needed because we do not know if there are DC offsets present from the audio the source. But these capacitors are the most expensive polyester caps money can buy. I took the electrolytics out after finding they contributed 0.08% to the THD.

The final figures are available:

THD = 0.0003%
SNR = 96dB
Freq Response = 10Hz - 90kHz
Type Of Amplifier = Transistors (matched pairs) with dual op-amp NE5534 as used in professional audio equipment.
Design: Class A
Output impedance = 32 ohms
Max Power output = 1 W into 32 ohms @ 0.0003% THD.

The following albums were used to sonically review this design:

Daft Punk - Random access Memories
Falco - Falco 3
Kraftwerk - Tour De France
Donald Fagen - The Nightfly
Martha and the Muffins - Danseparc & This is the Ice Age (LP vinyl playback with tube preamp).

No expense spared, not one part made in China. There are only two capacitors exposed to the audio in the amplification stage, and they are used for compensation and phase-shift.

Others who have sonically evaluated this amplifier have commented that it really brings out the best in your investment in expensive headphones.

This is the final circuit on breadboard.
I am going to roll a PCB next.

Always have plenty of different sizes of capacitors to eliminate electrical noise in the circuit .

I love Robotics but never get time for it, more have money for the components I want

In this case, all of these capacitors are for decoupling. Not noise per-se.
On the left, the two red ones are polyester types, chosen to ensure ultra low distortion. There are no other capacitors in the audio path. The other capacitors close to the transistors are part of the compensation network and feedback loop.

The AC power is rectified and ripple smoothed by two large capacitors.
The DC + and - is then regulated to +15V and -15V using two linear regulators. The output of each regulator is also decoupled using the two smaller orange capacitors. Therefore clean, regulated DC enters the amplifier.

Most interesting, I know a little bit of robotics but never get time thewe days to continue researching deeper into it, at moment I am only focused on one thing which I can to say , but it is what keeps me alive and positive and hopefull

In this weekend's test, using a Matt Bianco album, I have exceeded this benchmark:

https://www.naimaudio.com/product/headline