A blast from the past…

Recently I was rummaging around one of my (many) boxes of half-finished designs looking for something else when I found this – a Sijosae Gilmore board which I never put to any use.

For those of you that haven’t been doing DIY for as long as I have: This is a version of the original Kevin Gilmore class A headphone amplifier modified by Korean diy’er Sijosae to fit a much smaller board. Sijosae was an absolute artist who made miniaturised versions of pretty much all the popular headphone-amp designs of the day while also experimenting with different topologies for buffers, rail splitters and similar circuit components. Even if he is no longer actively posting you can still see his characteristic schematics pop up in google searches and being referenced in new designs as well.

Sijosae’s version of the Gilmore amp could (theoretically at least) be squeezed into an Altoids tin like a CMoy-amp. In reality there would be no space for batteries and the battery life would be very short because this amp runs in class A, but at least mechanically it would fit. He also made a simplified “EZ-gilmore” version of the Gilmore circuit which I cloned as well (but also never used, now I come to think of it…)

The Gilmore design is back from the headwize-days and the final PCB layout was done by an american user called Subsonic who subsequently offered it as a “group buy” on Head-fi in 2003. As I recall, this was the first group buy I ever participated in and one of the first headphone amp PCBs I bought internationally – if not the first. To say this started a tradition for me is something of an understatement (“avalanche” is more like it 😉 )

The board has been in storage for so long I don’t remember exactly why it was put away in the first place, but now that I have dug it out I am actually going to test it. I seem to remember it had offset-issues that I found very puzzling at the time, but I am thinking that the 15+ years of diy-experience I have added since might help me solve them this time… 😀