This looks cool:
thats a good learner kit
i wonder if theres any benefit to putting together your own audio stuff. like getting quality stuff at a cheaper price
Partially Depends on if your time and effort has any monetary value. Are you losing money not working all those hours you are dedicating to learning and making your own stuff? How much practice do you need before you start dumping $2k plus into high end kits, and how much did you spend getting tothat point? Do you have a plan or end-goal and what level of quality are you after? i took this into consideration, when i got it into my head to build my own full sized speakers. Everyone’s threshold for price/value/performance varies.
Well my time is incredibly valuable. I would even say priceless. But I have OCD. To save money I sometimes go to extremes that some might find embarrassing. also I think it would be kind of fun put together my own electronics. when it comes to fun I will waste enormous amounts of time. even though my time is so precious.
Also I wonder what money making opportunities could be involved in this. like for instance what if I were to purchase bottlehead crack and garage 1217 products and put them together and sell them as new assembled products on eBay? Would it make a pretty nice profitable side job?
Absolutely. For example, the average cost of drivers and crossover components is roughly 5% of the actual MSRP of a speaker. It’s why I’m designing my own speakers.
in speakers for sure, not so sure about amps, but speakers for certain.
The Bottlehead Crack (with speedball upgrade) sells for $725 at a few places. I believe they’re being built by Bottlehead themselves. If you can beat their price of $725, perhaps you can make a few bucks. Point being, you gotta do some research before investing. There may or may not be a market out there depending on what it is exactly you plan on doing.
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Amps as well - check out First Watt prices and compare to DIY clone builds. Speakers I believe are at the top of the pyramid by far though.
You can get amp kits from bottlehead
I think SS Amps, largely get covered by Chinese manufacturers, so cost of assembly doesn’t really save you much. Good amps are as much about the power sections as anything else. That coupled with the fact most people don’t want to mess around with surface mount components, limits the market.
Tube amps are a little different, but the circuits are relatively simple, and they often utilize point to point wiring, but component costs can creep up there even for OTL designs.
Speakers are heavy/bulky to Ship so manufacturing them in China is less of a win at the low end.
I have a number of books on Speaker design and did a fair amount of experimentation a number of years ago. You can build a really good speaker if you’re good a cabinetry.
You can DIY your R2R DAC by Soekris - DAM 1021, it might difficult to obtain though.
https://www.modhouseaudio.com/diy-products
JDS Labs also have a few kits.
I think I’d rather have an Atom than the O2 and once you also buy the case, it’s surprisingly close in cost.
Though I guess if you make or have a case its a significant saving.
Hi there, do you have a shopping list for the replacement/uograded Ninka’s? I had an amplifier short in my Rega Elex-r which fried the Ninka’s and I can’t bear to throw them out (they have kustone bases) so I have decided to do an overhaul with new drivers and tweeters but while I have it in bits, I think a crossover overhaul would also be a great idea. Thanks in advance