Now that I have a clearer vision for my “next project” that is in the works, I can start to actually talk about it here.

I was thinking of getting a far better sound system hooked up to my computer, since I like listening to (and sometimes making) music so much. One thought that crossed my mind was to hook up some decent speakers (i.e. non-computer) and an amp to my mac for this.

Unfortunately, amps are really unnecessarily expensive, because they mainly do a lot of things that I don’t need…

For one, the amps (or more accurately, receivers) that you buy from your local electronics store for about 200 bucks suck. They really do — trust me. I went shopping for a “higher quality” receiver to replace the one I bought a while ago for $250 and learned that anything less than $600 is pure trash (not from the sales people, but my own research/listening).

Now, I’m not getting snobby on anyone in terms of sound quality. I’m half-deaf in my left ear, and could really care less about how my Mac sounds. However, when a challenge presents itself to me, I really do want to step up and take it.

One day I managed to stumble on a bunch of crazy people like myself building unusually simple (and moderately inexpensive) audio amplifiers that supposedly sound magnificent. Do a search for “gainclone” on Google when you get a chance to learn more. The quick explanation is that the amps require only a handful of parts to build, and there is a lot of tweaking and manual labour involved to get some decent sounding equipment.

After reading a plethora of glowing reviews, I must say I was intrigued to try my hand at building a gainclone. Furthermore, I now have just about everything I need to do some serious hobby electronics and wanted to replicate the success I had with the VGA-LCD project.

I plan on documenting the process as best I can while I’m building (hopefully better than the VGA-LCD project) and keeping a record of what I learn throughout. As I mentioned elsewhere, a wiki may appear on the site for me to easily add content to while I learn more about what’s involved.

Watch this space.