Sunday, October 5, 2008

SS preamp with Jupiter beeswax and paper caps

This is the third of these OP amp (OPA2134) based preamps I have built. One was sold to an audiophile in Denver. In this build I wanted to use the Jupiter beeswax, paper and foil caps. They are 1uf in capacity and very large in size and supposedly hand made caps. With four of these large caps (see image below) in the die cast case there is not a lot of room for much else. A lot of attention was payed to cct. resonance control (see below), quality components, component layout efficiency, flexibility of input device selection and overall looks.

A 4oz solid brass knob looks well against the thick epoxy red paint. The Alps blue velvet attenuator provides a smooth and very linear feel to level control and helps keep the overall noise level down. The sound of the preamp is extremely detailed with mids and highs given full range and very extended. Mids carry multiple textures with voice sounding very earthy, even gritty and raw from male performers. The bass is deep, textured and rich. The sound stage comes through wide and detailed. Instrument placement is point sharp with each instrument or group of instruments having their own space and time. The background is deep and black. This is the best sounding preamp I have ever built and I intended to build more equipment employing the Jupiter caps.

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