Sunday, October 28, 2007

Synergy Chip Amp

The Synergy Amp is by far the best sounding amp I have ever built. Taking the concept of using inexpensive baking dishes for chassis one step further I grabbed the heaviest cast aluminum (3mm thick) Teflon coated baking pan I could find and torqued it down to a super thick timber chopping board. Using the principals of a mass-loaded amp the active amplifying components almost become a minor consideration. Now chassis and active components move-as-one, pure Synergy. The amplifying "bits" are a minimalist chip amp (LM3875) bolted to the underneath of the chassis under the heat sink.

This 26lb retro looking monster is dead, dead quiet with no signal. When played it delivers big time. Punchy, clear and a massive sound stage. The sound does not appear to emulate from the speakers but leaps from the wall behind and to the sides on the speakers.

The big caps are 10,000uf 100V electrolytics, the plastic rapper is pealed off and a red coat is sprayed on. These are by-passed by 10uf polypropylene and .1uf green caps. The 10uf caps for better mid-range transparency. 160VA toroidal tranny powers up the 50W RMS pc amp and a well snubbed rec. bridge provides clean power. The massive heat sink on top helps with cooling but also adds some extra weight directly above the chips. Pure silver wire is used for the sig. path and OFC use for the power wiring. Extra heavy copper wire connects the speaker binding posts to the amp output pins.

There is NO cct. brds,. at all in this amp. It is all point-to-point wiring. The passive compenent s are woven into the chip. The chassis is torqued down to the chopping board by two ¼” bolts, spring washers and wing nut. An RFI filter cleans up the 240V power and aluminum and pitchmen flashing covers the internals surface of the board to provide additional shielding and more resonance deadening. The amp plays extremely well and was in-expensive to build. It has now replaced my monoblocks as my main amp. Check-out the full write-up on diyaudioprojects.

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