Solid state, all discrete: no ICs, no vacuum tubes
Single ended, Class A circuit operating at 150 mA bias current (exceptionally high for a headphone amp)
No mains voltage inside the DIY chassis. Power is supplied by a commercial, safety rated, wall wart @ 24V DC
All thru-hole parts, mounted on a single PCB with generous spacing between components
Very easy to stuff and solder; suitable for first time DIYers. Component IDs and component values printed on PCB silkscreen.
Headphone output on front panel, linestage preamp output (RCA jacks) on rear panel
Pre-made front and rear panels, drilled and silkscreened, for DIYers who prefer not to do metalwork themselves. These are black PCBs, 2.0mm thick, cut to match the diyAudio Store “1U Galaxy” chassis front & rear panels.
Detailed, 37 page .pdf file named “Noir Build Instructions” walks you through the assembly process with plenty of photos. It’s 4.7 megabytes long, over the size limit for attachments here on the Forum, but is available for download on the sales page of the Store.
Fig 3 is the supply schematic. The DC wall wart output is filtered by a common mode choke and applied to a bridge rectifier. This means Noir can accept both (positive center, negative sleeve) wall warts and also (negative center, positive sleeve) wall warts. An LC output filter is then applied for additional smoothing. Potentiometer R2 and resistor R7 let builders adjust the current flowing through the LED “pilot light” and thus, its brightness.
You can also ask Mark at diyaudio he often pops in…he is a learning type of guy and often will answer your question with a question to get you to think!!
Huh for 69 bucks including the PCB and Chassis with all the necessary openings and labels, it’d be a fun quickie, too bad it seems to be out of stock atm on the DIY Audio Store.
Also :
Yeah Drilling holes is a pain, especially when you get that one hole 1 mm off center compared to the other one, making one pot look slightly further away than the other from the center ;-; . . . well we all have to live with our sins I guess.
Still nice job on the amp, hope it sounds well, looks good to boot, and is pretty compact as well.
Recently I bought a set of HEDD cans and the NOIR drives them with authority…sounds really nice. Was going to sell the NOIR, but after this I think I will keep it around.
I know I’m coming into this almost a year later, but do you’d till have the Noir? I stumbled on it at the diyaudio store the other day and thought it looked like fun as a first build. Currently out of stock, so can’t buy it now anyway, but was curious if you still had it around and liked it.
Yeah, I think I can still get the PCB and there is a “one click” BOM for the rest of the parts at Mouser, but there is a pcb/chassis kit that I’m hoping to pick up (when/if they get more stock).
Kind of been eyeing a Bottlehead Crack to go with my 6XX too, so hopefully I’ll get the confidence to pull the trigger on one of them sooner or later.
