What have you been working on in 2020?


New system? Getting into DIY? New bands?

I’d love to know what you’ve been doing that is audio-related this year. Dare I hope some of you have gotten soldering guns? Heat guns? Cables or caps?
For me, I’ve gotten into Roon and the Pi 4. Finally set up my combined 2-ch/HT set up with a new HT processor, and done a little blogging on Roon and subwoofers.  Last night I took my Pi 4 apart and added tiny little heat sinks to the RAM, USB and Ethernet chips.
erik_squires
Hoping to turn a pile of cherry wood planks of 1/2" and 1/4" that I milled and joined into something resembling quadratic diffusers before 2021. It’s only taken 6 months (as my eyes roll at how much work it was that I wasn’t prepared for)!

Got inside my amplifier after blowing bad money on "budget pre amplifier solutions" to attach my sub - costly and wasteful mistakes. I know now, do it right or just don’t.

Finally got my sub attached, using an interconnect geometry from an Audiogon user (sorry I can’t recall his name) who posted a page on helical ground coil spiraling round twisted pair interconnects. Anyway it worked a treat inside my amp. Purchased a Jensen summing transformer and connected my single double opposed firing sub - and smugly thought this is great.
Only to have Adiogon users espousing the superior merits of a DBA bass array, so yeah guys - thanks for the extra work I’m going to have to do (heheheh) to implement one, because I can’t just ignore you all. (seriously thanks for sharing).

Thanks Agon - I do appreciate the sharing, and entertainment.
Erik, can a Pi endpoint do multichannel USB output?

@mktmkt

I have no idea, suggest you find the Roku forums and ask there.
Hi Erik!
Nice of you to mention the things we can do ourselves! Eagerly waiting for 4 Auricap capacitors. Their designated spot in life will be coupling the EL 34 power tubes to the splitting/driver section of my Copland CTA 401. My system is not finished yet, but when all is said and done the system will be very much a DIY effort. The last action worthy of note was rebuilding a phono cable to a semi balanced layout. The screen completely removed form all signal. It works quite well. Of late I started to appreciate the SQ by using a SR Blue fuse. And, with the use of a lot of strong words (which can be typed freely in our hemisphere) I was slowly very much convinced of an unexpected improvement!

Kind Regards, StefV