Finally collected my Beta 8. The room is just crowded with speakers. I wanted to move the Diatone to the store, but am more worried that it may be damaged when other items in the store is being moved around. In the end, the Diatones are moved into a corner of the audio room.

In this position, I am not able to open some cupboard doors. Hahaha... May have to find a new home for it...

I listened briefly to the Beta 8. Played some tracks from Asian Roots - Take Dake with Neptune, Joanna Wang - Start from Here (SACD) and Keane - Hopes and Fear (Dual Disc).

Really liked the extension and fast bass. Not lumpy and does not suffer from resonance effects in my room. It can play loud. At least my whole 8-10 watts of single-ended tube power is more than enough loudness for my room. I really wonder how it will sound if i go with smaller wattage amplifier. The Yamamoto A-08s is on my shortlist. ;) Unfortunately, it is not a mono-block design.

At the same time, I collected my CD Pro2 LF kit! Yeah... gonna build my CD player!

More pics of the Corals here.

A long overdued post. You might have already seen the pics at my picassa albums. This project actually started out in June/July 2004, and was my first attempt to build a tube based amplifier. On hind sight, it was a little ambitious to build a 300B mono block as a first tube project. Nonetheless, there are people who did it. Me, I only got it right on the second attempt. Inspired by Sakuma san and Josh Stippich, I wanted to make use of those nice mercury rectifiers in my circuit. The RCA83 was bought locally at a rather high price. Netting these tubes on ebay would cost a fraction of what I paid. I did lots of reading about tubes, and also got some online education of such stuff at DIY Audio. The Net is such a wonderful tool... I even attempted to create a DRD calculator in excel that helps calculate the resistor values and B+ required when certain inputs such as driver and power tube operating points are furnished. I was suggested to use the Siemens c3g as a driver for the 300B tube. Suffice to say this this first pass project did not pass with flying colours. With a pair of inefficient (87db/m?) Totem 1 bookshelves, hum was evident even at 1.5m away. I rebuilt this amplifier around Oct/Nov 2006. This was also partly due to reading the success of Luis Gascón with his DRD using d3A/300B on diyaudio.com. I built my version with d3A as the driver, but using LED biasing. Testing this on my Mitsubishi Diatone PM610MB speakers (around 93 to 94 db efficiency), hum was only evident when my ears are around a feet away from the driver. All heaters are using AC for this build. Needless to say, I am very happy with my DRD amplifiers. ;) More pics here.