Start of the TU882R Kit and a visit to the audio shop

The pin vise (small hand drill) arrived from a eBay purchase last night, and I started to enlarge the through holes in the Elekit PCB to accept the larger resistors and capacitors. I must say for AU$20, this has got to be the crappiest pin vise or hand machine tool, I have used. In addition to leaving grey machine grease all over my hand, it did drill and work well, and now, all the resistor and capacitor holes are nominally 1mm in size. They are now able to fit the standard resistors and caps.

I drilled relatively slowly, and started from the pad/trace side and drilled through to the top size. It was pretty easy to drill, just making sure I wasn't creating too many burrs on the edges. After this, I will give the board a good clean with alcohol to remove any grease and 'sawdust' prior to the soldering.

Have a look at the photos. You can see that R7 has not had the holes enlarged, and can compare the difference in size. Now that this process has completed, I will slowly, but surely move towards the build process. If this can be completed and running by Easter, I'd be very happy.

Over the weekend, I had time to drop by the local Audio Note Kits distributor/retailer. First of all, he was a very nice salesman. Very friendly and helpful. He had the 300B Kit 1 and the 300B parallel interstage kit setup and ready to play. The SET was hooked up to a single drive full range in a Onken style box with a ribbon tweeter. The parallel 300B was connected to some $15k audiophile multi-way speaker. It was good to sit, listen and compare between the two setups.

The soundstage with the parallel 300B was much wider, and it felt that the musicians had room to move between them. The SET on the other hand, had beaming, and the sound stage felt as if it was between the speakers. So to my ear, the FR had the music confimed between the speakers and with the conventional multi-way, the music was between and beyond both speakers.

But the one constant that was confirmed to me, and my wife, was that both amps was really easy to listen to. The tube sound is so much more easy on the ears, and there was no fatigue, it was effortless to listen to the music being played. The way that the music sounds through speakers is quite different to that of headphones, obviously, but having tasted the speakers again, has spurred me on to making sure I can get a speaker set back up as quickly as possible. But, given I am in-between houses and with kids, this might be a tall order!