MINIRIG

After running my car battery flat at a festival camp site powering a small sound system using my car amp I thought it was time to look for something a bit more efficient. The car amp is a response 4 x 100RMS it has quite a bit of grunt but it produces mainly heat, the casing gets hot enough to fry eggs on. It’s probably only around 30% efficient at best. This is fine whilst driving as the battery is being replenished from the alternator, not much good if your stopped and don’t have the engine running though.

Looking around at whats on offer in the car audio market in the way of class D amps only came up with expensive mainly monoblock sub amps. There are a few full range multi channel car amps coming on the market here but they are top dollar.

Enter the Sure Electronics 4×100w D class amp module. Found on Ebay and for not much money, when combined with one of their power supplies ($120 for both including postage) it is possible to make up a fairly powerful bang-for-buck class D amp.

The case came from Jaycar electronics catalog number HB-5556 and cost around $50 which is a bit expensive but it is a very nicely designed and robust case. A pleasure to insert a electronics project into.

After seeing the module on Ebay and doing some google searching I discovered that on diyaudio.com there is an entire forum thread devoted to the amp and a lot of audio nerds experimenting with it.

Well now it is complete. The project was a lot of fun. Here are some pictures.

I have had a pair of Behringer MS20 monitors speakers. I’ve had them for a about 6 months or so. They have a fairly thin, but detailed sound for the price point. One thing with them is a good mix sounds VERY good, while a bad mix, or a badly encoded mp3, sounds woeful. I would ot call them mega accurate, but they do seem to show up bad mixes very well.

Note that I dont use these for writing music on, mainly just general music listening.. in fact more as a high end set of 2:1 PC speakers than anything, which they are great for.

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Another peek inside a favorite amp

The ART SLA1 I use this to drive my horns in minirig V6

Had this amp for around 4 years now and I am still amazed by how nice it sounds, think it might be getting better with age.

Well here is the guts of a TX105 model RCA stereo input switcher from Jaycar.. minimal “audiophile” pre-amp goodness (and shag pile carpet) at it’s cheapest:

Though not on the Jaycar web site any more they still appear to be in stock in the shops - the manufucturer Parada Company of Hong Kong also has a page on them.

Well, in a previous blog post on the ZOG blog I noted the Behringer UCA-202 USB sound card works fine with Linux and has quite good sound for the price point. After using it for a while quite happily, I got curious and opened it up to see what is inside. Essentially, not a lot but you can see the guts of the system is pretty much the Burr Brown PCM2902E chip.

Top of the board:

Bottom of the board:

Here are a few snippets from the live recording done last Thursday night:

start

middle

end

Digit Span Test et al LIVE
at GLITCH Bar and Cinema
on Thurs May 24
at 9pm $5

http://www.thechurchofspontaneousjoy.com/

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