DIY vintage high end clones - compressors/preamps?

elektro80

I have been pondering about planning a project for next winter. What about some sort of collab thingie focused on cloning vintage gear like the 1176 ? You know, finding schematics, drawing circuit boards, planning bulk buys of components etc? Front panel designs? On my wish list are classical compressors, mic preamps, channel strips etc. Some months ago I found a thread at some board somewhere discussing what really is inside of those high end outboard devices and the real cost of parts. This made me think and I managed to find a webpage with some schematics. In theory it is possible to build a 3000-8000 USD device for like 200-500 USD. In some cases even less. that said, I guess the web is full of guys who have already done so. What do you think? is this a nice little project?

zynthetix · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 8:34 pm Post subject:

I'm interested, I could use a good pre-amp for recording analog/acoustic sources and this seems only affordable via a DIY job...I would need some more info on whats involved to understand what I could realistically help out with. I could certainly handle any graphical end, i.e. front panel designs, creating nice printed diagrams or blue-prints, etc. Would this be more of a reverse engineering project, designing from scratch, or a bit of both?

mosc · Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 11:14 pm Post subject:

I used to do a lot of building. I'm not into it any more because of the time constraints primarily. Other than having fun, I don't see this as a valuable project since you can buy very good mic preamps pretty cheap these days. As fot the compressor, I'm sold on the G2 for all my processing needs.

I'm sure you can build very good circuits, but be aware that board layout have to go through several iterations if only to get the ground loops to be quite. You can't think though a quite design, it is experimental. Hum will creap in where you don't expect it.

It depends on what you are intersted in. If you have time for a project like this, I might suggest learing MAX/MSP instead. It might be more useful in the long run.

I hate to be cynical, but that's my take on it.

seraph

jksuperstar · Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:24 am Post subject:

True, much good gear can be had for cheap. But the niche things are what fascinates me Smile

I've been tinkering with a portable mic/preamp combo, small electret/condensor based, but supports blumlein, M-S, omni, X-Y, and figure-8, in one unit. The preamp is based on some relatively "expensive" (and I like to call them "Gourmet") Burr-Brown transformerless preamps. Basically as clean & transparent as possible. Any other color can come from post-processing. Working on the power supply now. People I work with design preamps & boards for magnetic recording, which has been directly applicable, and has helped me a lot in determining placement of components and routing of signals. If it works well, I'll be certain to make boards and/or kits available. Just one of my winter projects Smile

I call it the "jksupermic"

elektro80 · Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 2:40 am Post subject:

There is no sense in copying modern gear. I was thinking about classical designs that can be cloned. There are already many such projects all over the web and a lot of work has been done already. The 1176 compressor with JFETs seems like a great choice. I have found a lot of info already.

I have built a lot of projects way back so I am not scared by messing with hum and ground loops. All this can be solved. The nice thing about DIY projects like this is that the schematics are mostly pretty understandable.

elektro80

kenl666 · Joined: May 12, 2004 Posts: 66 Location: Pacific Northwest

Check out the various posts by user "owel" on studio-central.com, he's done a few clones.

seraph · Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 3:09 pm Post subject:

seraph