Posted on Wednesday, 4th January 2012 by Auw Jimmy

If you have read this previous article, probably you got my point when reading this one. Now, I’m doing the modification for the speaker. After several serious examination (well, you know me, I can’t be more serious than this time), it seems that there is no hope for the tweeter. So let’s find a good replacement. After googling around for several hours, I stick to the Vifa XT25SC90 tweeter. I use the ‘older’ brother XT25TG30 on my other DIY speaker and quite convinced with its sonic quality (despite its poor off axis performance). Price wise, you can get a pair less than $50. What a bargain?

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Tags: Bennic, Cable, inductor, Mission 762, Siemens, speaker, Tweeter, XT25
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Posted on Wednesday, 23rd June 2010 by Auw Jimmy

This post is the 2nd episode of my Terratec Aureon 7.1 FireWire mod. You can check the 1st one here.

Below is the final appearance of my Aureon. Sigh… despite the colorful capacitors, I don’t see any reason to say it’s a beauty or an art

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Tags: aureon, Black Gate, mundorf, sound card, speaker
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Posted on Monday, 21st June 2010 by Auw Jimmy

I’ve been very busy later these days, almost no time even to refresh myself listening the music. Powering my tube amp, let them warm up won’t take less than 30 minutes. Well for next few weeks, I don’t think I have such time. Now, I spend most of my time in front of my Notebook, limited with poor onboard sound card and speakers.

After digging my cupboard, I found a pair of Altec Lansing MX5021 speakers and my old Terratec Aureon FireWire 7.1. Not the finest setup and my ears were irritated to hear the sound at first time, although they were better than my onboard combination. On a lazy Sunday evening, I fire up my soldering iron. Let’s see what we could do to improve the sound

You can check here for my previous introduction about the sound card.

The main improvement should be the power supply. I found “el cheapo” 1000 uF  /35 Volt. OK, this was the main filter, the most important, let’s change it to Black Gate NX Series 680 uF / 65 Volt. Also note another capacitor changed to the “purple” Os-Con. This was on the digital supply section.

Enough change for initial stage. Let’s power it up and test the sound. Wow, that was the first impression on the 1st second I heard the sound. The sound was very transparent, the staging, the tonal, all were improved. Not to the level that I was expected, but for a consumer grade sound card, this was OK.

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Tags: altec lansing, aureon, Black Gate, mundorf, mx5021, sound card, speaker
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Posted on Sunday, 10th May 2009 by Auw Jimmy

I have received so many emails asking about how to do the mods. Why I do this? Why I do that? Etc… Ok, I will spend my lazy evening to use one good example and write a simple tutorial here. Just enjoy.

I look around my room to find a good and easy example to support this tutorial. Then, my eyes stunned to my old Simbadda CST z120 Dual-O speaker set. Well, it a small speaker, you can’t call it audiophile or even near it. I open the case and find that this small “thing” could become our perfect object.

You can get at your near computer retailer for very cheap price, less than US$10, I think. Feel free to find any other object. I pick this one simply because this is the only thing that I can find at my room (and suitable for this experiment).

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Tags: Capacitor, mod, pc audio, Simbadda, speaker
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Posted on Tuesday, 31st March 2009 by Auw Jimmy

It was a nice session at DWA’s house located at Bintaro. We held a long session, from morning to night, from amplifier, preamp, DAC, to speaker. The event was started with a lunch ;)

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Tags: Aikido, Audio, Blind Test, clio, gainclone, solid state, speaker
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Posted on Sunday, 8th March 2009 by Auw Jimmy

Since tomorrow is holiday, so I take this Sunday as a “long holiday”. So I pay a visit to my good friend, Mr. Paul a.k.a PJ. I also bring my DIY Speaker and my DIY Aikido.

I don’t remember the way to PJ’s house (been there once), so I fire up my GPS on my Asus P835. I search location of Cipinang and trace down a little bit. I mark the location on my Google Earth and put coordinate on my GPS. I’m ready to go.

After 1 hour of traveling time, finally I arrive. My suggestion, don’t trust 100% with a gadget named GPS. It’s good, useful, but you need a brain with good logic to make it perfectly usable Just use it, and you will understand my point.

Here is PJ’s system. A nice floorstander speaker from ProAC (R3) and a bookshelf R1S also from ProAc. You also can see his 2A3 amplifier and 112A Pre-Amplifier there. A nice system as reference.

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Tags: DIY-Audio, speaker, tube
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Posted on Friday, 13th February 2009 by Auw Jimmy

Was a tough and tiring Friday. I want to listen some music (but I need to tweak some). Ok, fire up my iron and start to cook it right away.

If you don’t have any idea about my DIY speaker, feel free to visit here and here.

Ok, basically I just add 0.47uF K40Y-9 capacitor on my high pass filter. Current configuration is a little bit too bright on the tweeter, so I need to lower the F3 of my high pass filter. So here it is…

The high pass is 2rd order, combination of Siemens PIO and K40Y-9. Also Sfernice resistor used there. The inductor is Alpha Core Foil Inductor. Bought it few years ago, not the price is getting high and higher!

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Tags: crossover, DIY-Audio, speaker, tweak
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