kyo-to-ky-o

Well, ANK used to really be the kit version of Audio Note. Apparently when the supply lacked Brian offered different components than the ones stated, like Beyschlag resistors instead of tantalum resistors etc. I get a hunch that AN UK doesn't like the fact that through the internet people educate themselves. Quality control is exactly that what caused Audio Note to divide itself into Kondo and UK. My approach to this is this works like a division between an approach of hollistic perfection (Kondo) and market perfection (UK). The schematics aren't that special but the use of material is. In the case of UK its not all the time something that happens honestly, with transformers you can speculate, but the example of the switches you cannot. Besides that these switches have really really shitty handling, it's reach of 24 steps is fairly low. Does it matter much? Depends. If you sell your amplifiers as the legend that the Ongaku is, then in my opinion it does. The monopoly exploits of UK are quite offensive. Anyways, Kondo has moved on and I know my pick if my audio-budget would have been in that range.... Anyways, I think that the point has been made, and I'm more curious about what people do with the kits rather than what AN UK does with the market. When the time comes I'll peel the plastic off the electrolytics. I once did the modification of an electrolytic by not only peeling the plastic off, but removing the entire aluminum housing and casting it into wood and beeswax. After installing them, the lady that was in my place at that time was stunned by the change in sound.

No worries! With audio it's all about reasoning and with this sport one stays healthy right? It is important to pick and get informed by the people from who you think you can learn and constantly keep in the back of your mind this 'your milage may vary' sentence. I'm just putting my finger on the toxic qualities the cocktail of money and subjectivity has got. This video at the 6:38 mark, the Ultimate Special Edition Signature MKII sums up the complete audio madness: "If you move up the Audio Note food chain, you get a little bit more refinement every step of the way".

No, your own ears and experimentation are fine. I am just giving advice not to outsource this to anyone on the internet (including my own advice). I never mentioned using the Kasei as coupling capacitors, I would never use an electrolytic as a coupling capacitor or directly in the signal path (perhaps in a headphone amp if there's no money for output transformers). I agree with the BG being over blown, the Kasei caps wanted hop on the wave where the BG left of... My listening experience is that they DON'T deliver, especially not for the price range which is utterly ridiculous. Silmic II are my choice for electrolytic capacitors, and in the PSU it varying on function Obbligato oil/ASC, Unicon, JJ (yes, I mean it) and Mundorf. Note that I have ofcourse not tried everything everywhere... I tried to address market speculation here which AN UK does like to exploit. For example, if you check hificollective and the switches they sell. The AN switches (it was sold for 60-70 pounds, now unreachable on the web store) are the same as the Blore switches (28 pounds), I wonder whats the AN UK process to increase the value of this switch. Also, the SEIDEN switches are the ones to get: The AN switches are like sanding paper where SEIDEN is face-creme. Also, I am not saying that its not possible to improve the AN copper capacitors. But if there are Beyschlag resistors everywhere (or these Kasei caps), there are other fish to fry.....

Personally, I would never bypass coupling capacitors. I keep the 'art of' bypassing in the power supply and the speaker crossovers. Again, be wary to what is written on the internet and see if there is a possibility to check things out for yourself. Replacing coupling capacitors is a really easy job to do and if you don't trust yourself doing this perhaps someone in a guitar shop who is servicing amplifiers could do this for you. So heres a contradiction for you, try and do some reading on the internet of people who compared the Audyn capacitors with the Duelund. It's still a matter of taste and something that one should hear for himself, but it's safer gambling money (with the internet on par or above). The only true thing to avoid are the Audio Note Kasei electrolytic capacitors. Playing with the status of the Black Gate (but lacking the graphite paper which put the 'black' in the Black Gate), these over expensive capacitors - the most significant aspect of similarity to the BG - have an overall poor sound (ok, the mids/voicing is pretty good but as a result it 'flattens' the sound). I've been playing with them for way too long at a critical point in my amplifier. The sound after repositioning the Silmic II was so apparently more musical.. this, despite my Japan-fetish vouching for these Kasei caps... Anyways, there are several practices in the world of audio, and the worst possible approach would be that the amount of money spend equals the amount of sound quality you get. Of course we deal with material properties (silver is more expensive than copper) and build quality. Without a frame of reference, anything can be good or bad. We are conditioned that spending more money results in better quality and this will shape our interpretation (which is per definition subjective). I am pretty sure that if you would keep the copper AN capacitors, any dissatisfaction with the sound of your dac will be directly linked to the coupling capacitors because of the things you've read. The AN UK approach of 'levels' in their amplifiers are directly coupled to this money-equals-sound approach. One can only imagine the discomfort one gets with a real Audio Note system (Kondo) where the amplifier can't be altered in levels because it already is at its best......

A good friend of mine tried Audyn Copper Max instead of his Duelund cast capacitors. And even though he was determined to put back his Duelund capacitors, he ended up keeping the Audyns there. Bear in mind that the Audio Note Copper capacitors are very good capacitors already, you might want to focus on something else, like the power supply. Also try and follow what you hear rather than what you read (yes, in this regard you should include my advice), x material could yield x result which might be the opposite of what your 'chain' needs. Also, if you have pictures of the 'guts', there might be better places to stick a few bucks.

Cool stuff! Good to know that its a family business. I am very unknown with the workings of electronic devices, all that I know I've 'learned on the fly'. I remember reading an essay about transformers by who I assume would be Brians' father, I only understood half of it.. but that was before I've hooked up a transformer. There is something about Sowter that very much appeals to me; typewriter style datasheets, stone-age website but 1000% intel! Something tells me that it takes a lot of extra money to get the AN equivalent of the Sowter, but that's all intuition.. Glad you got the correct resistor value. Get a nice 6K8 Shinkoh tantalum.. partsconnexion, hificollective and acoustic-dimension is still stocking these (they're great!). The places where the 6K8 have to go are R1 and R11 if we deal with the assumed 3.1 schematic.

Ah this is something related to the DAC topology. Since I've build that myself I can check the datasheet. As far as the KITS are concerned, you're using pin 21 and 4, so you're connecting to Lout. IF you want to be definitely sure, set your multimeter on 'beep mode' and measure from the 4th pin on the left on the left side of the DAC chip to the resistor at the side of it. The pins are numbered as followed: left side starts as 1 and goes to 12, bottom right starts with 13 and goes up to 24. If you don't understand this I'll try and add a picture to clarify. Cheers

Sorry for 3 posts in a row.. but I've rechecked it and R1 and R11 are definitely not the right value to begin with. On this photo you can see that the resistors that should be having stripes of orange, are brown at yours.. Try and change them to the correct value.

PS Michael, There is also huge improvement to be made by replacing the resistors in your board. On this board everything used are Beyschlag metal film. The easiest road for improvement would be replacing them for Welwyn/ Mills resistors in PSU section (some already are wellwyn) and tantalum resistors in the output section. Perhaps the 330r on the cathode could be a carbon or metal film, but thats yours to try out and see for yourself.

Hey, I've been checking every now and then this particular topic because I'd like to see if I could a grip on blueixus with some detailed questioning on the ad1865 board, I'm also getting a waveIO and I'd love to try I2s out. For your board, it's the dac 3.1 board, the value you have to change is R11 which is a 3k3 resistor. It should have a color code like orange orange black brown brown. The resistors on your dacs' side (the other side of the trafo) are the tantalum resistors. What will you be doing with your old transformers? As for Michael, the PCM63PK should be a very good dac chip, I think you can better change the whole dac instead of fiddling around with that. If you're really interested in trying to upgrade the sound, my bet would be at the output capacitors. These are already very fine paper in oil capacitors from Jensen (rebranded as AN or Angelica). You need to put some money into that to go past it. My guts say that Audyn Copper Max should be a fantastic cap, but in the DIY the stars in the show are Duelund and V-cap. The Obbligato Premium tin foil seems like one to try out as well. @astrostar My guess would be that Andy took the digital filter out while Peter sat in a chair talking about it. When talking about nicking you could also look into the history about An UK and Kondo.. I mean no harm with that, and I do believe a lot of 'right' are in the AN material. I think the dac kit is not so great, or lets say quite away from what would be optimal. First see the cut corners with the utilized transformers. The earliest kit still has the TRANS-103, these all got replaced with hammond. It is also quite inconsistent with various material, fun hobby material but I would not touch go that route. Note that also the dacs from AN has gotten further development on their own, that doesn't mean that the DAC itself doesn't produce sound anymore, and that every step forward is one for the better.. You get it. Don't pinch me down on details but, when the dac got developed there where two people on it, Peter van Willemswaard and Andy Grove. Andy Grove's design eventually got utilized but PvW modded and developed his own version. It's using shunt power supplies for the dac, has gotten all kinds of problems tackled AN UK isn't considering. I haven't listened to it, but it makes a damn lot of sense.