Have you ever done outboarding?


I have a space issues inside the chasis of my compact mono amps that had already underwent the huge upgrades of rectifying bridges; coupling, bias smoothing and electric bypass caps; Caddock feedback, input resistors for input and splitting tube as well... The space issue was present back than but somehow had been arranged successfully.

I still have a DIY sting on my "behind" and wish to upgrade filter caps and make choke-regulated power supply but there is no place for huge and fast ones and for the choke together and I'm thinking of outboarding the whole power supply into the separate chasis along with power transformers.

Has anyone done an outboarding mods to the amplifier or preamp?
What will I benefit from outboarding power supply and what will I loose?
Whould you recommend or would you not to do such action?
128x128marakanetz
If you go the separate Power Supply / Amp route, i would suggest leaving at least the caps in the amplifier box. This allows the circuitry to pull from the caps as needed rather than have to draw all the way back from the power supply box and all that additional wiring. Putting the caps in the transformer chassis would limit dynamics, etc... Many folks that built outboard capacitor reserves for old Dyna and Phase Linear amps found this out the hard way. They helped, but not as much as cramming the existing chassis as full as they could.

On top of this, DC suffers from longer runs in a far greater manner than AC. Moving all of the rectification circuitry out of the main box also puts a damper on things as you'll have drastically increased the supply and return path. As such, your best bet is to move the transformer out of the main box and run HEAVY wiring from it to the rectifiers that are still housed in the amplifer chassis. This might give you enough room to do what you want AND keep the secondary PS boxes small enough to be manageable. Sean
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