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.

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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).

Finally finished my TA3020. A few hurdles in the build. Had some grounding issues and managed to drill through one of the electrolytic capacitors 😐 Is all done and powering my compression drivers now in my tri-amp system, sounding sweet as. (clic pic)

It’s not often I get to put up some photos of someone elses DIY project but when I saw this my first thought was “Thats a gawd damn Minirig if I have ever seen one!” Presenting the Buckapound BoomBox.(click pic)

The last build of the year. A good amp for a NYE party 😉

A fairly straight forward build. All up took about 3 days. It uses a pair of Hypex UcD400st amp modules, Antrim 500VA 40-0-40v Transformer, a pair of 35A 400v bridge rectifiers, 4 x 10000uF 100v Jamicon filter caps and a SKA-Audio soft start. (click pic)

Iv’e been a bit distracted building these laterly. Will get back to the ESP kits soon.(click pic)

Put this together to split the outputs into my subs and mid-highs (micro-doof system). yes, they are the knobs off of a Fender Telecaster 😉

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Initially, I was just going to hardware hack the opamps in the InterM DIV-9123 crossover. The project got somewhat expanded…. The end product has by far exceeded expectations.