These speakers have been a favourite of mine for ages. I got them over a decade ago second hand for $600. Given they are now at least 12 years old and probably more I decided to replace the capacitors in them. As stock they are KSC 50V non polar electrolytics.

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I while back I got some JPW Sonata speakers from EBAY for $67 AUD. They are nice “entry level” English bookshelf speakers of reasonable quality…

Laurie Anderson is sitting on my bed singing to me this evening. Earlier Tom Waits popped in.

Basically, I am gobsmacked by these little sealed boxes. I don’t know if it’s because they are in a small, quiet bedroom, mounted on a solid wall, or because they have an Audio Innovations amplifier powering them. They are sublime and emit this beautiful warmth and richness that makes me not want to leave the room.

I’m not quite as impressed as the above reviewer, but they are very nice little speakers for the size and price, especially for acoustic music.

And the sealed enclosure means they mate very well with a subwoofer.

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Goals:

Learn about making speakers by building some 2 way speakers using some low cost drivers using ideas borrowed from the AudioKarma Econowave project. And make some full sounding floor standing speakers by virtue of big cabinets and large drivers.
Results:

BASS!!

And knowing a hell of a lot more about speakers than I did 6 months ago. Thanks to Col for all the help and hints in getting this off the ground.
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Been playing around with a couple of new SiliconChip kits.  The Multi-Function Active Filter KC4580 and the Bridge Adapter for Stereo Amps KC4569.

After a friend mentioned that he wanted to run his subs using his amps in bridge mode I thought I would try it myself. This is what I built (click pic).

A quick and simple Sure Electronics 2 X 100W amp build using an old 1RU rack case and a laptop power supply.

(click pic)

I have had an ART SLA-1 (aka the Unika MT1000) amplifier for nearly two years now.. I got it after Col showed me it was heaps better at driving my Alesis Monitor One speakers than my old faithful Rotel 30 watt amp. This is not that the Rotel was a bad amplifier, it just didn’t have the headroom to drive the relatively low efficiency Alesis speakers, they really do need a 100W power amp to get the best from them.

Here I’ll document some minor tweaks and random info on the ART SLA-1 amplifier for future reference..

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Well recently I made an Alien Dac kit purchased from Glass Jar Audio. This was to free up my Behringer USB sound cards for use in my laptop with MIXXX.

In short: the kit works and sounds amazing!.. Though the purity of it’s signal path (no output op amp to buffer) means it’s a lot quiter than my other sound cards. Interesting that playing my wife one of her favourite tracks she was asking about an instrument (snare drum brush) she hadn’t heard in the mix before.
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Very basic, quick build TA2022 amp.

(click pic)

You can get a Lepai TA2020 amp off Ebay very cheaply. They sound good straight out of the box but to get the full potential a little hot rodding goes along way 🙂

Marked on the PCB are all the component values. When I started to look at the components they didn’t match up, i began measuring with my multimeter… Then I started replacing things……… (click pic).