Building the Kookaburra was a lot of fun. I managed to not screw up the soldering job, and initial tests indicate that it’s doing the right thing.
However, when trying to integrate it into my amp’s case and pipe its output to my amplifier, sparks flew. I managed to melt a trace off of one of my power regulator boards, and I’m not sure if the individual amplifier boards survived. For now, the amp is completely dead until futher notice.
I think that during my wiring, I might have inadvertantly caused a short somewhere which caused this miniature light show.
I just can’t seem to catch a break with electronics/computers this past month. First the botched MacBook Pro repair, then a faulty firewire enclosure, and now a blown amp! I think I’m cursed…
October 26th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Given your computer state, toasting your amp is quite the bummer. I’ve got a bunch of parts that may get your gainclone working again. Let me know if you need anything mail up north to you, it is a lot easier to drop a couple parts in an envelope than to put an order in to digikey and pay for shipping and wait.
Are you power supplies still OK? The gainclone is so simple that there isn’t a whole lot that can go wrong that isn’t immediately obvious.
Sheldon
October 27th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Thanks for the offer, Sheldon!
I have a sneaking suspicion that the explosion was localized to one of my two regulator boards, and the two amp boards were left unscathed. Because the regulator failed, though, one of the sides of the transformer was probably fed directly into the two amps’ +V lines as 22VAC.
I’ll need some time to verify that first - hopefully over the weekend. Maybe I’ll need to take you up on that offer if things don’t work out otherwise… :)
January 11th, 2008 at 12:35 am
Chris, I realize this all occurred quite a while ago, but did you ever figure out what part of your amps let out the magic smoke?
If the amp “modules” went kaput along with the power supply boards would you be interested in acquiring some new ones? If so, send me an email.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I still don’t know which of the parts was behind the 4875 explosion. I bought a pair of Twisted Pair amp modules to go with the kookaburra, but they started to behave strangely when everything was hooked up.
One day I should revisit all this and try to get something working again.
To replace my self-built amps I simply bought a rack-mount studio amp to power my office speakers (a pair of B&W 600-series bookshelfs) - it sounds pretty good except for the fan powering the amp. ;)