Finishing touches…
March 19, 2020 1 Comment
So, like most people these days (at least the ones with office jobs I guess…) I have been at home for the past week due to the COVID-19 restrictions. Apart from more online meetings than I really wanted it’s been OK. I am not sick and to be honest given my circumstances at the moment I am about the last person who should complain about this situation – so I try not to :D.
Another reason why it’s not all doom and gloom (at least not yet) is because being asked to stay indoors as much as possible means I’ve had time to finish up some of my half-finished projects. I’ll be posting these over the next weeks (and hopefully add more to the pile in the mean time) 🙂
First up is an eBay-clone of the Naim NAC152 preamplifier (originally shown here). I had halfway cased this up a while ago, but I decided to make some changes to the front panel layout plus add a matching PSU. The obvious PSU choice was a STEPS which I fortunately had nearly all of the parts for already. I also had a chance to look at the PCB layout for the STEPS and revise it a little, so if you keep an eye on the project file page I’ll add a revision 1.5 board file in a few days. It’s not major changes, but when you’ve been away from a design for some time there are always things you want to improve which you could not see the first time round.
The “Naim” preamp was promising enough on first listen that I decided to put it in a simple case. The cases are from Modushop and they have a nice profile I think. The only thing I haven’t done is splurge on thick customised front panels, but that’s not really necessary anyway. I added a second output on the PSU because I have quite a lot of other preamps designs that run on 24VDC so this way I can keep a single PSU and switch between them.
Soundwise I’ll be trying this out “for real” in my main system as soon as I hopefully manage to fix an intermittent connection in one of the speakers – it has been bothering me for a while but as I now use the speakers daily now is the time to (finally) do something about it 😀